Slashdot Mirror
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."
I'm sure people are just going to be lining up to pay AOL for the privilege of sending mail to its users. I'm also sure that users are not going to switch when they find out that their friends can't mail them because they or their ISP did not pay the AOL tax. Yes indeed, this plan is going to be so popular. I'm sure the spammers are just quaking in their gold-plated boots.
Under their existing policies, 1 piece of email is bulk.
(I'm not kidding: I've had this runaround with them when an AOL user clicked "this is spam" on a personalized mail with pictures of a wedding... 1 piece of mail if it generates a complaint, is not only spam, it's "bulk".)
Those of us who manage free high-volume mailing lists will be removing aol addresses from those lists - we'll see if your statement that it's only slashdot making a mountain out of a molehill becomes truth.
Sign up for Gmail using SMS - this lets them limit the number of accounts per cell phone number
Agreed.
I suppose you could always try the alternative tactic of charging each AOL customer a fee based on your transaction costs plus the overhead to track the costs for each email delivered to AOl in addition to each email send from AOL
But it just occurred to me. AOL won't care. They push BLOGS not LISTS. If everything is on blogs for discussions then there isn't much else to do. That and there's the added plus for AOL in that they can more readily manage your content to make sure you comply with their AUP. You see email can't easily be recalled.
Ok, first off, every AOL customer I talk to, basically we take away. For several reasons.
1) things work without all the advertising from US (can't control other sites, but WE aren't hammering them.
2) We're cheaper
3) We have better spam and virus filters
4) We actually CARE about what our customers want
5) We don't provide worthless tools and pass them off as keeping you safe (this counts against "others" also)
Perfect example of the last one. I have a system on my bench right now. It was purchased 4 months ago with "AOL protection already installed and setup. Today I found 10 viruses, and about 349 spy/adware items on the system (per adaware scan). Due to the huge amount of CRAP on the system, I may be forced to reload it due to the huge amount of damage done to the system. It could probably be cleaned up, but laborwise....cheaper to backup and reload.
This isn't the first time either. My shop averages about 3 a week that come in for malware problems that have AOL, SBC, Earthlink, or "others" installed that simply aren't doing their jobs. These are ISP related tools that aren't working. I'm not counting the stuff like spybot or whatever that is purchased that isn't doing it's job either.
Little things like THIS is only going to tick AOL users off more when they can't get their mailing lists anymore. I have about 200 customers running mailing lists and they are all small and free mailing lists. One of them is a quilting list for pete's sake with like 50 people on it, and 35 of them are on AOL. I expect to see quite a few new customers when AOL pulls this....I'm counting the days.
...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...
Seriously guys, I have a spammer in my datacenter that uses Ironports to send email out across AOL, MSN and other large networks due to agreements allowing commercial email sent from those devices to be automatically whitelisted.
So, spammers get to buy some boxes and get around (ahem) *spam blocking* and the users whom want to have mailing lists have to *pay* to keep their mailing lists from bouncing all to hell as well.
Nice.
Yes, opt-in lists are bulk. I had to jump through lots of hoops to get onto AOL's whitelist program just so that people who sign up to my web sites can get their confirmation email.
Once I got on it, it was fine (unlike Hotmail, which randomly drops emails on the floor, to the chagrin of my customers). We get a surprising number of AOL users who mistake the "this is spam" button for the "delete" button, but apparently not in large enough quantities to get us de-listed.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
What about my slashdot replies? Is slashdot a mailing list, or are those considered "personal" emails??? Is every OSS project with a sourceforge.net address going to get blasted by this?
That doesn't strike you as a bad thing?
Nope, it doesn't. There are lots of technologies that allow you to deliver content to users automatically. You need look no further than yahoo groups as an example - users can send an email to the group and it will be posted to the group website. Those who so choose can set the group to email them, and others can check it through the website.
There are other technologies that can allow people to automatically get updates without using email - like rss. Spam is a ridicuously high volume of email, and I have no problem whatsoever forcing people to switch to better suited technologies to help cut down on junk mail. It's not exactly like the non-profit mailing list is a very major part of modern internet usage.
But its very easy to get blacklisted by AOL. Just need a couple people to report you as spam. They don't even tell you they are blocking you. You just start not being able to send. AOL will now have every incentive to blacklist companies so they can generate more income.
No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style.
It's been long postulated on Slashdot, by a multitude of posters, that an effective way to remove spam is by setting up a payment system. The key is to make it easy on those who mail casually, while hurting the spammers.
The idea is that you send an e-mail, pay a penny. Or even a quarter of a cent. If you receive an e-mail, you would ideally get the entire amount that the sender paid. But, because of how businesses are, you'll likely get 70% of that. Ideally, most users would only have to pop in $5 a month.
Regardless, this system would make it much harder on spammers. While a user may spend a quarter a week to send e-mails, spammers would be paying tens of thousands of dollars so they can send millions of e-mails. People will actually want to receive spam- the money they receive will more then make up for the mail they send.
One of two things would happen. Either the spammers, suddenly not making nearly the profit before, would drop out, or people would quiet down about the spammer problem, since it would not only pay for their own e-mail, but earn them a small profit (in fact, people getting mail accounts just to receive spam and earn a few bucks a week could become a problem.)
Obviously, there would be some problems initially. Opt-in corporate mailing lists, regular mailing lists, notifications, etc. However, with some brainstorming, I'm sure a good plan could be made, removing one of the major hastles of the internet.
And then all that would be left is Internet Explorer. (And the neocons can entertain themselves with shutting down porn, haha.)
I think MS hotmail may be doing or moving towards something similar. Email from our Mail server automaticaly always gets classified as junk by hotmail (we don't do mass mailings, spam, or similar, so there is really no good reason for this). After contacting hotmail about this they replied: "Not much we can do, but for a small fee we'll let your emails through". Or, in their words:
"[...] However, Microsoft accepts e-mail messages that may be allowed to bypass some of Microsoft's filtering technologies from organizations that are approved by the Bonded Sender Program (www.bondedsender.com), powered by Return Path and certified by TRUSTe. [...]"
Also, I'd just like to say that most of the comments I've read seem to want to crap on this idea just because it comes from AOL, with no valid arguments, just some cute joke. If you ever deal with AOL on a professional level, you'll realize that they actually are a pretty smart group of folks. Sure, they do some annoying things and bring a lot of people onto the internet that maybe shouldn't be there, certainly people who wouldn't be there otherwise. But they aren't stupid, they do understand quite a bit about how the internet works, and I think it is possible for them to have a good idea every now and then.
-Lod
Amen!! If it weren't for the fact that they're sending physical CDs to physical mail boxes, they'd very easily be considered spammers, and for what? I highly doubt a good percent of the people who receive AOL CDs actually use them (for their intended purposes).
A proud provider of services through the Microsoft Reboot Engineer Certification since 1997!
> I now incinerate any aol trial cds I get.
Oh, we use those as craft supplies. You let the kids glue them shiny-side-out to things. It doesn't much matter what things you let kids glue them to; kids just like to glue stuff, and CDs are shiny, so as long as you don't do it too often (more than, say, once a year with any given group of kids), they have a blast gluing AOL CDs to practically anything. For instance, if you have accumulated only enough AOL CDs for two per kid, you let them glue the CDs back-to-back and run a ribbon through the hole, and it's a Christmas tree ornament. (Yes, this is incredibly lame, but a typical six-year-old thinks it's the best fun he's ever had.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
*Be honest: if you were a phisher, which person would you think is smarter, more Internet-savvy, and less likely to be sucked into your scheme: the person with the aol.com email address, or the person with the gmail.com email address?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Mailing lists that are otherwise free might like to either prevent AOL users altogether, to avoid complaints that come from users if legitimate mail gets marked as junk -- or impose an appropriate subscription fee for AOL users to join, in order to cover the expenses of "Goodmail" status for the list, and the administrative costs related to collecting the fees.
When AOL users see that they will have to pay to join certain popular mailing lists that are available through other ISPs for free, they may be encouraged to switch to a provider that provides fairer options of classifying potential spam.
I'm sure I'm going to be modded down for being off-topic, but screw it! AOL, MSN and Yahoo! capitulated to the Alberto Gonzales Gestap^H^H^H^H^H^H Department of Justice's fishing expidition for "evidence" to revive its non-existant case for reinstating a 1988 child porn law. These search engines betrayed their customers by handing search results over an unspecified period of time. Yahoo! claims to have "stripped out all identifying information", which is phantom "compromise" since there are many search terms that contain identifying information in the text of the search itself.
Only Google stood up to this travesty, on the basis that it was legitimately defending its trade secrets.
I was a moderator for a Yahoo! Canadian politics group, in addition to using Yahoo! Mail, Briefcase, Messenger and Chat. After I found out about the DoJ capitulation, I resolved to boycott all services from all search engines that complied with the subpoenas.
So AOL can do whatever the hell it wants. It's all irrelevant to me.
This space left intentionally blank.
Anyone who isn't on the whitelist will probably not be affected by this. Most servers are not on the whitelist. Getting on it is about as easy as getting Dell or Netgear tech support to send you replacement gold bars in the mail.
The people this will really affect have servers that simply forward mail. We host commerce sites for people who don't know anything about the internet or what to do with it. They receive mail at their domains, and then we forward it to their AOL accounts, which they actually know how to check. We need to be whitelisted because if we aren't, we get blocked for forwarding any spam that our clients get at their domain accounts.
The users control what is marked spam, so it's not reasonable to expect them to understand when you tell them repeatedly not to mark messages as junk any goddamn more please.
Another note: a few months ago, AOL spontaneously started bouncing mails that had UNCLICKABLE URLs in them. So if you typed a URL in plain text, you got bounced. Real funny, I swear.
Oh, and I'm trademarking "Greenlisting"
I just got on their "whitelist". They sent me a confirmation email, saying how they will deliver the messages but they do not guarantee the fact that the user is actually going to get them in their Inbox since their junk mail filter is apparently configured based on individual settings.
Well fuck, if AOL thinks I am going to PAY them in order to reach their "users", AOL is wrong. I will give these users an email account with me. Come to think of it, I'll do that with Verizon's customers too, at least until Verizon learns how to detect spam.
Goodmail my ass.
Z
don't forget to attach a brick to make the fee more euuhm 'heavy'
Here in .nl we have something called an 'antwoordnummer' (answer number) which is the mail equivalent of a toll-free number.
:) ;)
It's basically a PO-box where you can send mail to without postage, as the recipient pays for the mail.
There have been numerous projects here to collect those cd's, and mailing them back to AOL/Compuserve using their 'antwoordnummer' - Thereby making them pay (by weight) for receiving them back
There have been variations on the theme, eg first shredding the cd's so they can't send them out again; or as token of appreciation, sending them a complimentary brick included in the package (saving them the trouble of replacing the windows where the brick would otherwise have been thrown through
I'll be modded to hell for this one, but I've got karma to burn. The basic process is you sign up for some trial of a service - some trials are free and some cost money. For the mac mini offer, I did a month trial of blockbuster online (which costs 15 bucks a month). I ended up keeping the service because I liked it, but you can cancel your trial after you get credit for it. Of course, some companies are a pain in the ass to cancel, keeping you waiting on hold and all that annoying crap. Then you refer people to sign up, and if they sign up for a trial too, you get credit. Get enough referrals and you get the item in question. I have gotten two so far - an ipod shuffle (3 referrals) and an ipod video (5 referrals). The mac mini requires TEN referrals (ick). The shuffle took around a month of leaving the link in my /. and email sigs to collect the referrals, the ipod video took significantly longer. But I didn't really DO anything to promote the links, just left them attached to messages. I've had friends very agressively pimp their links and get all their referrals in a week or three. You can figure on another couple of weeks to a month after you complete the process before they get around to sending you the ipod, though.
To me, I didn't really do anything, ended up with a netflix alternative that I really like, and have a video ipod. That's worth it in my book.
Kind of offtopic but deals with business reply.
You can also fill the credit card envelopes with the daily coupons and send them back. I got a complaint about it once since it cost them money on the postage so I mailed them the postage too. Since thirty-seven cents is kind of heavy with seven nickels and two pennies, they probably had to pay extra postage.