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AOL to Charge Senders for Incoming Email
pdclarry writes "AOL announced on January 30 that it will phase out its Enhanced Whitelist service in June in favour of Goodmail CertifiedEmail, which carries an as yet unspecified per-message fee. Until now, a mailing list gets on the AOL whitelist by following good e-mail practices, such as cleaning up dead addresses, making it easy for people to leave mailing lists, and of course not sending any spam. This is all going to be thrown out the window and replaced with the payment of hard currency to Goodmail. People who can afford to pay this fee will have the privilege of reaching AOL subscribers, others will end up in junk folders. Yahoo is expected to follow down the same path."
This is going against the reason that junk mail folders are there... Basically the junk mail folder will become just another spam-infested inbox.
From last April 1st. Right?
....right??
Seriously, this has to be a joke. Pay? To receive email?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
...At least, that's what all their contacts are going to say when AOL tries to charge them for the "privilage" of contacting them. On the bright side, this ought to drive even more AOL'ers to other services, though!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Why does anyone use AOL anymore?
...of when I was doing tech support for a DSL provider, and we had people that called that still used AOL alongside DSL. When informed that they didn't need to AOL software to access the internet anymore, they responded "We want to keep our AOL email address for our business."
That made me laugh.
The headline makes it sound like AOL will be charging all senders a fee to deliver mail to AOL customers. TFA seems to say that the charge is only to be certified to send high volume email, like mailing lists or legit bulk mail (ie spam from somewhat reputable companies). Another /. headline making a mountain out of a molehill. You'd think with the way people used to bitch about MS FUD around here all the time, this stuff would be a bit less common.
http://www.google.com/search?q=gmail+invite
isn't this in a sense like selling out your own subscribers.
i.e. they don't like that the spammers are spamming, but if they are willing to pay them, then they really don't care?
that's why even free mail services beat out AOL (especially GMail) because they just try to filter out everything as spam.
If you're going to pay double the price of other dial up companies, shouldn't you get spam-less email? How can Netzero/Netscape ISP/PeoplePC afford to take in $10 a month and somehow paying $23 for AOL means not even getting the most basic of spam filters. $23 is approaching low-speed DSL rates.
This won't be a problem. Just means more gmail accounts. Seriously, someone sent me an invite over a year ago, I created an account and don't use it much yet. But it has had ZERO spams which is more than I can say for my Yahoo! account that gets em and all I use it for is system testing.
AOL is dying anyway, which is why they no longer have the resources to fight spam and are instead outsourcing it.
Democrat delenda est
Okay, first reading it I thought that AOL actually had the audacity to charge maillist senders per email so that the email wouldn't get junked. But reading the article, it seems they are talking about enabling links and images when viewing an email (which a user can do manually). But still, the idea that they would do this (An Email Tarrif almost) is ridiculous. All under the guise of "protecting users from spam". Puh-lease.
And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be bannana-shaped.
I just read the article, and I don't think the title of this posting should be "AOL to charge senders for incoming mail" but "AOL to charge senders to ensure email don't get flagged as spam."
From the looks of it, I could still send an email to a friend with an AOL address and not get charged for it. However... any any images linked to would be blocked, and links within the email would be 'non-clickable' unless you sign up for AOL's program. And the poster makes it sound like it's an expensive deal - the article mentions several times that the fee is "a fraction of a cent per email." Doesn't mention whether or not there's a hefty signup fee or not...
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
> ...make it expensive enough that a SPAMmer can't send out a million
> emails without feeling the pinch.
And so that noncommercial mailing lists cannot exist at all.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
All I can do is block any and all AOL origionated connections from any I-net resource I have influence over. That's now done - and should've been done long ago. AOL is a product unto itself. The internet is something all together different.
The I-net is dividing into two classes. Those that use it and those that're used by it. I refuse to further facilitate and/or enable the continued abuse of the 'not yet educated'. Instead I vow to support, educate and lead 'n00bs' into effective and responsable participation and membership in this world wide community.
Yea, even if it's *just* helping my neighbor get Firefox installed - every bit helps. Hell, at least I got him OFF of AOL and onto a local ISP that provides a real I-net experience (FF was just the begining). The Internet is not a shopping mall packaged and pablum loaded empty calory gorging of other's sweet waste. That's AOL - an empty, but well packaged product leeching off of the reality and efforts of the Internet and it's citizens - and making a mockery (and profit) of it.
Spam needs to be faught, but like so many social ills, it's a symptom of a larger, not an intrinsic 'evil' in itself. The problem is blatant comercialisation. The same economic drive that's turned television into a mindless, soal robbing robotic eye into a two dimensional fantasy.
But this stupid and greedy decisioin on AOL's part is an attempt to grasp and retain power over the infrastructure. By sheer mass, an attempt to turn a profit over what many consider a basic human communication. Mmm, maybe we need an Open Internet....
Anyone who buys into the idea that this is some kind of alturistic manouver for the good of all needs to return their Willy Wanka bars. The freak'n elevator was a special effect and you ain't gonna see no Munchkins - no matter what the wrappers say.
Senior NCO in the fight against entropy. I've seen things, man. Things no one should have to see.....
I think that the time for sender-postage-paid email has come. It's the only solution that has any significant chance of really killing SPAM.
Yeah, 'cause nobody ever gets junk snail mail!
This idea's been around for a long time and it's just silly. If someone has to jump through hoops to send me email, I would rather they do something sensible, like get their public key signed by someone I trust rather than just proving the have access to five cents.
There are other major problems as well. Like what is I want to send out an anonymous email containing evidence of Ashcroft himself torturing "terror suspects". It's REALLY easy to trace money and the evidence is kept around for a long time.
Life is too short to proofread.
Have you ever actually hosted an RSS feed? Imagine 50,000 people hitting your server for 50K every five minutes (or sooner, because they can't figure out how to configure they're software). Sure, that's doable, but a hell of a lot more expensive than a one-shot mailing list.
An ISP can try to give its customers a better experience, it can huff and puff and look tough. But blocking mailing lists won't stop actual spam. Spam is sent out by zombie machines. Random, short-lived little mail servers in random residential IP blocks.
E-mail lists work in a way that blogs and "yahoo groups" and stuff can't. Let's say I want to receive a newsletter that's sent whenever there's news. Once a week on average, sometimes more, sometimes less. I don't want to have to remember to check a web page all the time to see if there's news. I don't want to check it once weekly and find that they updated on an irregular day earlier in the week for a breaking announcement that I missed. I want that content to be pushed to me so I can read it if it's there as I take my afternoon tea, along with all the other news I read in that way.
You can go and reinvent the wheel, come up with another way to push content onto your users. If it gets popular enough it will be spammed. And yet there will still be a need to push content. Or maybe you could try something like RSS, if you wanted to install and set up a server that would be hit up every hour by whatever fraction of your users decided to even try "that newfangled RSS thing". Newsgroups are designed for just this purpose, but they of course have their own spam problems and many users don't know how to use them.
Or maybe AOL should just drop their arrogance, admit that spam is a difficult problem for which they have no better answer than anyone else, and start behaving with a level of responsibility corresponding to the effect they have on the Internet community.
I'm not a big fan of this model. Still, it could help some people. Folks have complained that it won't stop companies like MSFT, The Gap, etc., from mailing because they'll have no problem paying for it. However... that's not the purpose of Goodmail. It's to make it so the dredge can't get in and make it so that if you do tell the sender to stop emailing you, after their email has nicely arrived in your inbox, your response will get processed and you'll stop getting their email. With the spammers there's no real or legally binding way to do that. With this model the senders will be easily and accurately identified and the processed of opting out structured and adhered to.
You could always put them back in the mail box marker "Return to Sender" and make them pay for the postage again.
Not to bust your bubble, but bulk mail of that type is thrown away instead of actually being returned.
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
Then stuff them in one of those prepaid business reply envelopes that you get from credit card companies, and then post that.
Maybe they'll both learn then!
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
After RTFA, it sounds like this whole token thing is a lot like the Habus Warrent Mark. I have yet to recieve a legit email with the Habus Warrent Mark. What is to stop spammers from forging a header under the GoodMail system?
Now, discussion boards and mailing lists will need to purge and actively reject individuals using aol.com addresses. What other choice would operators of such boards and lists have?
I run a board myself, and I'm now going to have to go through my list of users coming from aol.com (hopefully none or not many) and send out a warning that they will need to change to a different email account associated with their userid before June.
And... I would have to update the board code to show an error message to new users trying to register with aol.com email addresses.
Blecch. Why does AOL have to do this? It's like they want to throw up a Great Wall of China between themselves and the rest of the Internet.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Perhaps if they keep enacting dumb ass policies like this one, it might start to affect the user base that makes them so profitable, the people that just don't know any better. If it continues to grow in stupidity, even the stupid will see.
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.