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."
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.)
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.