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."
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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"
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