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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.
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.
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.....
No this affects mailing lists, not spammers.
If they want to block spam they can use filters. Spam these days tends to come from millions of zombie windows boxes - they'll continue to send small volumes of mail to AOL from forged email addresses and be completely unaffected by this.
Large companies will pay because, presumably, the cost will be less than their average profit per email.
The folk who will be left in the cold will be those that host free mailing lists - that could be your local church, local voluntary associations, schools, folk who freely manage topical lists of interest etc. These folk won't make back the money because email isn't a revenue stream. They're the only ones who will see any effect.
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.
Tends to be a drag when you're running a legitimate mailing list and somebody can't be bothered to look at the procedure for getting unsubscribed ... and suddenly emails to everybody at his ISP start bouncing, and the people who aren't getting their mails think it's because YOU screwed something up.
It also happens when somebody explicitly sets up a ~/.forward on your system (on their account) to forward all their mail somewhere else. Which seems reasonable, but then they go reporting spams received wherever they read their mail, and that system decides that `oho! This site must be an open relay! Look at the Received: headers!' and submits you to a RBL without even bothering to try and forward a spam through your system.
There's lots of knee-jerk reactions going on out there in the name of `fighting spam'. Perhaps they're the right thing to do most of the time, but not all the time. And trying to convince somebody that they made a mistake? Fergetabout ...
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"
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