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AOL to Charge Senders for Incoming Email

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the virtual-postage dept.

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."

10 of 462 comments (clear)

  1. Obvious Question but it needs to be asked... by Bryansix · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why does anyone use AOL anymore?

    1. Re:Obvious Question but it needs to be asked... by murdocj · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Ok, here's the deal. My parents use AOL. They are in their 80s. They've had computers going back to the Apple II, but they aren't geeks. They just want to communicate with their kids via email and look at an occasional web page. So they are comfortable with AOL. I've occasionally told them they ought to look into an ISP and DSL. They've muttered a little and then gone on with their lives. You know what, THEY ARE RIGHT TO USE AOL. It's what they want. They are happy with it. It does what they need. Why the frack should they change? To please you? You don't like how they access the net? Well, maybe I don't like the car you drive, but guess what, I don't get a veto on your car, you don't get a veto on my parent's AOL. Deal with it and move on.

  2. This reminds me... by garrett714 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...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.

  3. Another misleading headline... big shocker by MustardMan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. welcome to Gmail! by sonamchauhan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    http://www.google.com/search?q=gmail+invite

  5. uhh by akhomerun · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:I hope there's a patent... by John+Hasler · · Score: 4, Insightful

    > ...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.
  7. Re:Whoa. by shrewd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    in the end being charged to send emails to AOL users will just become another of the long list of reasons why AOL users have no friends and are the butt of many a joke...

  8. Email lists are useful and good by Al+Dimond · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  9. Re:Dupe. by dougmc · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Just need a couple people to report you as spam.
    That's not specific to AOL. There's a number of ISPs or hosts (or have been, anyways) which will start blocking all emails (to all users) from your mail server after a few emails are reported as spam. Which seems reasonable ... at first. Looking a bit deeper, apparantly some users will report mail as spam rather than unsubscribe -- even for a mailing list that they explicitly subscribed to themselves (i.e. send a mail to list-subscribe@whatever, then reply to the confirmation email with the special cookie ...) Even when every single email has unsubscribe instructions at the bottom. Even though the emails aren't `spammy' at all. (Though it can happen when somebody sends spam to a mailing list too, but that's not really what I'm talking about.)

    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 ...