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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.
I wish I could charge AOL for sending me all those AOL CD's I get in the mail.
The following statement is false.
The previous statement is true.
Welcome to my world.
From last April 1st. Right?
....right??
Seriously, this has to be a joke. Pay? To receive email?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
...At least, that's what all their contacts are going to say when AOL tries to charge them for the "privilage" of contacting them. On the bright side, this ought to drive even more AOL'ers to other services, though!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
I never knew talking to AOL members was a privilege worth paying for.
Cthulhu Saves.
Reading their Sender Qualifications indicates you European emailers are pretty much screwed:
Accreditation Criteria
In order to meet the strict qualifying criteria, an organization must, among other things:
- have at least 1 year of business history, as verified by a commercial identity verification service
- ***have business headquarters located in the United States or Canada ***
etc...
www.christopherlewis.com
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.
This won't be a problem. Just means more gmail accounts. Seriously, someone sent me an invite over a year ago, I created an account and don't use it much yet. But it has had ZERO spams which is more than I can say for my Yahoo! account that gets em and all I use it for is system testing.
AOL is dying anyway, which is why they no longer have the resources to fight spam and are instead outsourcing it.
Democrat delenda est
You mean AOL is going to piss off loyal users of crap software who don't know better by making their software crappier and charging people for it? Yep, sounds like AOHELL alright.
Okay, first reading it I thought that AOL actually had the audacity to charge maillist senders per email so that the email wouldn't get junked. But reading the article, it seems they are talking about enabling links and images when viewing an email (which a user can do manually). But still, the idea that they would do this (An Email Tarrif almost) is ridiculous. All under the guise of "protecting users from spam". Puh-lease.
And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be bannana-shaped.
I suppose the main concern I have with this system is AOL's idea of "bulk" - will opt-in mailing lists end up being considered bulk traffic?
This title is quite misleading.....
Just RTFA before getting upset!
Bulk emailers on one hand and AOLers on the other? Let them have each other.
...although there isn't much to describe how that distinction is made. You would assume it's by the volume of mail sent.
How would this work with zombie mailers that don't meet the threshold for "commercial e-mail senders"?
BWilde.
Is it just me, or does there seem to be an increase in terribly misleading headlines on /. lately? AOL isn't charging for all incoming mail, they're charging commercial emailers to send email to AOL users. As far as I can tell, AOL is a dying breed whose users won't really notice the difference, and are probably used to service problems anyway.
Honestly, maybe about 1% of my spam contains links or images. The rest use something called "text" to get their spam-riddled message through, and a written address a la "http://www.something.com" (which is parsed anyways). AOL will still let those through. It'll just block images/links (but not written out addresses).
So I say again: how will this stop spam? The only thing I can see this do is making it a pain for non-profit entities to send mailing lists (schools, charities, orchestras, etc.), and making a quick buck of legitimate companies who want to send legitimate messages to subscribers.
Don't get me wrong: I'm 100% against spam. I just don't think this is an effective manner in any way to stop it. If anything, I'd say its just a means to make a quick, dirty, buck.
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.
now mail, what will they drop next? The Web? Bah, all overrated anyway.
AOLers: Just get a gmail account, and a better ISP.
You Personally advocate a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
(x) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
(x) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a fascist for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
I guess this is one case where buying in bulk is not to your advantage.
A-O-What?
The purpose of postage on snail mail is not to prevent a deluge of junk mail from filling citizens mailboxes (that happens anyway). It is to subsidize the delivery of mail. A tax on email would be idiotic and unnecessary. The solution is actually pretty simple. Spam filters have gotten widespread and accurate enough that spam is no longer really a problem for the average end user. While it is still a strain on mail servers, bandwidth is getting quicker and cheaper every day.
eclecti.cc
Don't most people pay to recive email? Or at least use an advertizement supported system that pays for the bandwidth, etc.
This would be a great idea if there were some sort of simple way for people to add mailing lists that they want to be on to the system, and an easy way for people to disable mailing lists that they get on accidentaly, or are sick of. So many people get on 'mailing lists' that they don't really ever subscribe to.
Anyway.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
> ...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.....
I read TFA. (OK, I read the first 1/3 and skimmed the rest.) I never saw a mention of money. How much is this going to cost? And it seems like it's just talking about large volume senders, not people who send a few at a time. Is that what you got too?
San Francisco Photographers
In other news, the rest of the Internet has started charging AOL for every SPAM email that appears to come from an @aol.com address, as well as for every spread of a virus from an unpatched AOL customer, allowed to browse the web without a parent nearby.
-Patrick
"They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
Sorry to the younger slashdotters here but I've also got a song from the Doors in my head with the line "This is the end, my friend the end," Sorry but at this point in time I'm willing to put money on the Vegas odds that the internet will no longer be a viable business or personal tool by 2008.
I'm also will to bet that the only ones willing to pay the certification fee will be spammers. Others don't have enough volume to justify it.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
I have to say that Bluebottle is the best free email service ever. It has better spam control than AOL. Only allowed senders can send you mail; anything by anyone else resides in the pending box.
Anyway this doesn't make much sense(TFA), then again, who uses AOL?
Fallout 3 will suck.
AOL has just single-handedly turned the "ISP for dummies" into the "ISP for the rich and trendy".
So on top of seemingly first-rate customer service, Dutifully high prices (compared to modern broadband) and a limitless supply of "limited access". I have to pay more for my laptop running Debian because they have to put a 56k winmodem in it.
"Why does a flashlight need 4 D-cell batteries, they must have an agreement with acme battery co. and general light bulb company..."
This is a misguided step in the right direction. The cost of email needs to be bourne by the sender.
I believe there needs to be a new mail paradigm, in which the mail stays on the senders server until collected by the recipients. This would serve two purposes. Firstly, it would help return at least part of the cost burdon to the sender. Secondly, it would help somewhat in identifying the sender, as the sender has to keep a server live till the recipient collects the mail.
Just my $0.02 stamp worth.
Or another potential solution (in line with your spam filter concept) is to actually start enforcing the RCFs on mail servers. Sure it won't stop the real spam (the stuff companies are sending out from their computers... i.e. the stuff that is relatively easy to block), but it sure would help out with all the unintentional spam (i.e. virus infected "personal computers"/"spam factories")
No I won't punch a hole in our firewall so your friend can send us email. If your friend would get their act together and actually read the docs then we wouldn't be having this conversation... /cry
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those that understand this sig, and those that beat up people who do.
The problem is that most anti-spam filtering systems also block an unknown (and unknowable) amount of email. When this happens at the ISP level, the user generally has no recourse and no way to even find out that the mail has been blocked.
Email is now utterly unreliable for anything except personal correspondence. It is no longer practical for any business communication to customers - especially things like confirmations and receipts.
This situation has been brought on by both spammers and vigilante anti-spammers.
Going at the bottom of all my ads: "Since AOL has seen fit to *leave* the email system you will have to use a valid email system to reach me and the vast majority of the internet. Sucks to be you."
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
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.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that jail 'manages freedom.'
You mean it attempts to stop people who are inclined to break the law from hurting those of us who are inclined to be decent human beings? Sounds good, then.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
...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.
I join and drop from mailing lists as a matter of course. I'll be damned if I'm going to personally pre-whitelist each one to my personal whitelist, and the senders will NOT pay AOL anything for the privilage of not getting sent to my spamfile.
What would this mean for me?
A few missed emails and one more reason to change mail providers.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
from Goodmail Systemi ons.php
...
http://www.goodmailsystems.com/senders/qualificat
CertifiedEmail Charter Sender Program Qualifications
To prevent fraudulent use of the CertifiedEmail service, all applicants must meet the highest standards for mailing practices. Goodmail's comprehensive accreditation process confirms a sender's identity and sending domains, ensures that a sender's email programs conform to Goodmail's acceptable use policies as well as compliance with anti-spam legislation. Privileges to use the service are established in accordance with a sender's reputation.
Accreditation Criteria
In order to meet the strict qualifying criteria, an organization must, among other things:
* have at least 1 year of business history, as verified by a commercial identity verification service
* have business headquarters located in the United States or Canada
* transmit messages from dedicated IP addresses, even if sending email through an email service provider (ESP), and must have at least a 6 month mailing history from that IP
* have a sending history which indicates that the complaint rates associated with their IP addresses are among the lowest of senders transmitting to Goodmail's ISP partners
* be able to comply with Goodmail's Acceptable Use and Security Policy and agree to the Token Purchase Agreement
If you are interested in participating in the CertifiedEmail Charter Program, you must apply for and successfully complete Goodmail's accreditation process. Initially, the Charter Program's enrollment will be restricted to a limited group. It is possible to pass accreditation but be ineligible for the limited charter program. In that case, an organization's accreditation application will be considered when the system is open to broader commercial availability. The Charter Program will be limited to brands that are well regarded by most consumers or small businesses.
The accreditation application processing fee is regularly $399.00. A special charter price of $199.00 will apply to all applications submitted by July 31, 2006. This fee is non-refundable. Please review the accreditation criteria above before beginning your application.
Why not enforce usage of SSL Cert for email??? Can it be true that AOL is just that stupid? So AOL actually think that spammers can be detered by using Goodmail? So now, AOL users can only recieved spams from ESP legitimate network spambots and "trusted" network. Soon, AOL users will only be able to send and recieve emails among themselves. AOL will need to change their name to "Among Only Losers"
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Charge a $.01 tax on every email sent.
:)
Yea, it's not ideal... and some companies would be fucked up because of it... but it's the simplest and most effective solution to a spam problem there is.
How to implement it though... that i'm not sure.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
I think that the time for sender-postage-paid email has come. It's the only solution that has any significant chance of really killing SPAM.
Yeah, 'cause nobody ever gets junk snail mail!
This idea's been around for a long time and it's just silly. If someone has to jump through hoops to send me email, I would rather they do something sensible, like get their public key signed by someone I trust rather than just proving the have access to five cents.
There are other major problems as well. Like what is I want to send out an anonymous email containing evidence of Ashcroft himself torturing "terror suspects". It's REALLY easy to trace money and the evidence is kept around for a long time.
Life is too short to proofread.
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.
This policy seems really stupid to me. My buddy who doesn't pay AOL to get his email address recognized will have his email sent to my trash bin, but then some spammer who is profitable enough pay AOL to get his email through will be able to send me as much email as he wants. If I was an AOL customer, I think I'd start only reading my trash folder and ignore my inbox.
No Sigs!
May have to be some exceptions for Parkinsons because sufferers have such a hard time accurately clicking the unsubscribe buttons, and Alzheimers patiences who subscribe to the same list every day.
Ok, yes, I'm in a truly insensitive and utterly evil mode. I'll duck now, as I turn off the Karma bonus on this one.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Judging from the rash of response, I can see that a good portion of people here either do not have AOL accounts or do not know how HTML mail works in AOL.
Currently, if you receive a HTML e-mail in the AOL client, any links or images in the message are not displayed. Instead, only the text of the e-mail is displayed, and a "button" at the top of the message window allows the user to turn on images and links in the message.
What AOL is clearly implementing is a way for "validated" third-parties to pay to have their HTML e-mails sent to AOL users with images and links turned on without requiring the user to take action to see them.
That's it. Nothing more to see here. Please move along.
I completely disagree. The solution to spam is legislation and enforcement. Spam is fundamentally a social problem, not a technical problem (although spam has certainly pointed out many technical problems, some of which have been corrected).
Spam exists because 1) it's profitable to send spam, because somebody will pay you send spam on their behalf or because a small percentage of your victims will buy whatever crap you're peddling, and 2) you probably won't be arrested, convicted, and hauled off to prison. Change these, and spam will stop, because it will no longer be profitable and safe.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
So what are non-profit or volunteer organizations with mailing lists supposed to do?
Spam usually doesnt actually come from the person who's name appears in the From line..
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 wonder, is it also going mark as plusungood all mail from organizations that don't use proper Newspeak?
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
Have you ever actually hosted an RSS feed? Imagine 50,000 people hitting your server for 50K every five minutes (or sooner, because they can't figure out how to configure they're software). Sure, that's doable, but a hell of a lot more expensive than a one-shot mailing list.
...they just didn't pay you. They paid the marketing and development guys to make the CD's, they paid for the cost of the CD itself, the shipping charges, and the packaging. Not to mention the programers to make AOL in the first place. And you threw away their hard-paid-for product.
After all the effort they put into marketing it to you, the least you could have done was install the thing. Geez.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
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.
Holy crap, why do I always use up my last mod point right before finding something so deserving?
Well done!
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Set up your RSS feed right, so that they know it only updates once a week. Duh.
"Yeah, 'cause nobody ever gets junk snail mail!"
That may be true, but I've never paid for junk snail mail. There's economic incentive to not send me shit I don't care about!!
Do you care about penis englargement? Fake degrees from non-existant, non-acredited institutions? Drugs that are not legal yet in your country since they haven't passed testing? I've never had junk snail mail for it. I also don't have ~200 junk snail mails a day attempting to be delivered to my mailbox.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
We know how to identify mail sent via Ironport's "Bonded Spammer" program, and put it in a junk folder. Now how do we identify "GoodMail", for similar treatment?
First off, I get about 50 spams a day to 10 legitimate email. My spamfilter has almost 100% accuracy. And I do check it.
Google for "dspam".
Even with legitimate email, sorting mailing lists into separate folders, for instance, is a good thing, because I can skim through a lot of it, knowing (mostly) what it's about. The same is true of spam -- it'd be a nightmare sorting the 50/10 by myself, but I can usually skim through a bunch of spam subjects looking for the ones that look legitimate.
Will someone please fill out the checkboxes fo dspam? I'd like to know why so few people actually use it.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Will yours?
My Baysean spam filters work just fine, and I literally get 1000s of messages a day.
If someone tries to charge me to receive e-mail from me, they will no longer enjoy the ability to correspond with me. Yes, I'll include customers in this, too.
I will not pay 10 cents to send you an e-mail. Get over it, get a real e-mail provider. I might pay 10 cents once to tell you that.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
You know what's kind of funny, I don't get junk snail mail anymore.
Of course, there was some... unpleasantness that caused some levee breaches, some flooding of the mail-sorting equipment, and some Post Masters halting delivery of such things. But, hey, no more junk mail!
Of course, my wife doesn't get her magazines anymore either, which is a pain.
So what if I set up a GMail account which automatically forwards everything to my AOL account? Is AOL going to send Google the bill then?
Must we go through this again?
You Personally advocate a
( ) technical (x) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
(x) Microsoft will not put up with it
(x) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(x) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
(x) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(x) I don't want the government reading my email
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a fascist for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
goodbye Internet (now that pay-per-tier is coming out), goodbye E-mail
What is this "AOL" you speak of?
The only difference here is that AOL is collecting the nickels, not the mail recipient. So it's, of course, corporate greed rather than customer service.
Maybe on Internet2. Or whatever... once we've all got our $money_qty rfid tags injected into our fingers, after physical currency is eliminated. Of course, the issue crops up when you've got a legitimate mass-mailing. Presumably you'd just blacklist your customers that don't return (or do accept, depending on when the payment is sent). For a small mailing list it's no biggie, but even something like forum notices would get expensive, and it could cost tens of thousands of dollars to send out an issue of Newegg's newsletter, or something to that general effect.
Still, I honestly think it's a step in the right direction.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
And they abuse it anyway, and you can't send updates more than once a week, and they'll get annoyed if you do it less than once a week.
Sorry, but RSS is broken by design as a "feed". It's interesting in other ways, but I'll send my updates by email.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
Actually you do. Bulk rate postage is subsidized by first class mail, and you have no way to stop it (your tax dollars at work).
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.
I'm sorry, but I think this is a horrible idea. Off the bat I'm against paying for any kind of traffic... I mean, why should I pay to connect to a server for a couple seconds, but cam browse the web all day for free?
...and with all the information companies keep online that gets stolen, why would I want yet another possibly irresponsible person with my CC or paypal information? As it is right now, I won't use anything that requires online payments, as I just don't trust them anymore.
All these schemes to rob the net users of more money (micropayments, preferred traffic, etc) is just bullshit, and should not be incouraged.
Spam is a big problem, and has almost ruined email, but this is not the solution.
If greedy domain name registrars would not let these idiots register 400 domains at a time, and instead had a better system of verifying who they are sold to, then maybe it wouldn't be so bad. This also has me worried... in 5-10 years, what domains are going to be left that are recognizable, and not already used? Hell I don't want to register 12dewgt43.com because all these idiots have taken most of the words in the english dictionary.
I used to own the domain "aesirstudios.com", but had to let it go due to financial troubles, and now someone else is sitting on it who has NOTHING to do with the name. This is ridiculous. Someone just saw that it was once and active domain, so they grabbed it to try to blackmail me in the future to buy it back.
END RANT.
If I can't smoke and swear I'm fucked.
First of all, the emails not on this whitelist are not blocked, they merely have any images or links hidden (and while I am not an AO(hel)L user so I cannot know for sure, I'm guessing there is a way for the user to enable them once they have verified that they do indeed want this particular email). Thats the way they currently have it set up, only now it requries senders to go through a lengthy certification process which they have determined is even harder to go through and less effective.
So no, it will not kill of small free mailing lists.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
that can be done on the subject of pay-per-use email is covering this news article. Given enough coverage, people will get used to the idea of paying for an email. Then before you know it, we WILL BE paying for an email.
Desensitisation at its very best.
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.
The idea is that spammers spam only because spam is free.
My junk folder right now is full of Russian spams. I have no idea what they're selling; I don't speak Russian. But they sent it to me because it cost them literally nothing. It would take only a few people actually responding to the email to make it profitable. Phishing attacks work the same way; they send many emails and don't care about the vast number that don't get through.
Spammers have to send out millions of messages a day to reach their marks. Even at a tenth of a penny per email, it runs into real money real fast. This should cut out that sort of utterly random, opportunistic spam.
There are other problems. I run a few mailing lists, and I suppose I can afford to spend a buck or so for each mailing. But really popular lists, like the joke-a-day kind of lists, will have a problem. At that tenth-of-a-penny, 100,000 AOL subscribers will cost you $100. That would be a lot to ask of a free daily service.
The solution to that, I think, is going to be RSS, where you pull your daily joke rather than have it pushed to you. Or they just live with the risk of not being on the white list. Don't send spam and you won't (hopefully) be blacklisted.
It also won't stop the spam zombies, who don't necessarily look like a mass mailer; the look like an individual sending out a lot of messages. AOL may be able to recognize those and cut them off, too: "IP address www.xxx.yy.zzz sent 10,000 messages this hour. Let's open one of them up... yep, it's spam. Block all SMTP connections from that address."
That's tomorrow. Today they're trying to force mass senders to put trivially priced postage stamps on things. Most valid mass-email senders can afford to pay the trivial price; spammers can't. At least that's the idea. It'll be interesting to see if it works.
So.. uh.. Where can a Gmail user go to help these poor lost AOL users with an invite?
A proud provider of services through the Microsoft Reboot Engineer Certification since 1997!
ahhh it all makes sense now...
I use it for some non critical business emails.
,dns for the last 7 years.
Sounds crazy but you can always rely on that email to be the same.
I have used that email address for the last 13 years and for the 15 bucks a month to not have to worry about customers not contacting me due to email changes its worth it.
For the posters who are gonna say its because im a clueless newbie,
I have ran my own freebsd box mailserver
The same people that spout aol users are lame are the same people that say anyone that doesnt use(insert-- current flavour of linux in favor --here) are lame.
I dont use aol as my service provider I only use it for non changing email redundancy.
AOL may very well have a future if these large providers follow through with their "strategic" plan to tier the internet. I will have no problem moving back to dialup, though probably not with AOL. However, I'm sure others who are interested in stopping this madness may well consider AOL as an option.
Will bulk mailings that didn't used to now end up in the spam folder? Honestly, just not showing images/links right away doesn't sound that bad. It's the default behavior of Thunderbird at least, and I don't really mind. Thunderbird does seem to think a lot of emails are scams though. Like all winning bidder notices from ebay.
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 haven't seen a spam (nor a virus) that *actually* came from a real AOL address in 6 or 7 years. The occasional spoof, yeah, but not the real thing.
And I check the headers, because back when spam truly from somejerk@aol.com was common, AOL was good about yanking abusive accounts (usually within 30 minutes of being reported), which made it worth the effort to get 'em killed.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
you can spam our users but you have to pay us for the right. And we can continue to ignore the requests of our customers.
I don't got mail, I don't got mail, I don't got mail... Yaaaaayyy!
Doesn't anyone check the last option?
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
... marks email from non-payers as double-plus-ungood?
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
Actually, I'm rather old here, and have not ever seen it. Still quite a good one though.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
It's very much like the article Microsoft Will Sell Whitelist Services For Hotmail from 2004, and just as misleading. Only the names and headlines have changed.
Back then, Microsoft was not going to just let anyone who could pony up the cash get their mail sent through to subscribers. And now, AOL isn't going to just let senders pay to get through to AOL recipients.
In both that case and this one, the mail provider is turning to a third-party accreditation service. That means Goodmail (or in the previous case, Bonded Sender), does its own checking on the senders -- and yes, charges a fee. But in neither case is it a pay-to-spam scheme, and in neither case is it a matter where *not* paying will guarantee that you get dropped in the bit bucket.
Wait until mailing lists that you want to subscribe to start charging you because they have to pay to send you a email!
Mind you, I'm fairly well convinced that anyone who's paying $24.95 a month for dial up in this day and age is probably not the sharpest crayola in the box. Since you're obviously too stupid to find one of the $4.95 a month dial up services and save yourself $20, I guess you deserve to pay even more to get your email.
Come to think of it, it might work out well since the AOL users won't be cluttering up the mailing lists with stupid questions and getting offended when they get an "RTFM" reply.
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
What's so +2 Insightful about demonstrating that you haven't read the article?
Where does this form come from? It's well-written, effectively-used, and I see it all the time. Does someone maintain a master somewhere?
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
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
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 think you should have read TFA. It is obvious that you did not; the article says that AOL will only be charging volume senders. A mailing list with 35 or even 100 people on it would not qualify as people that this article applies to.
Slashdot, please keep the FUD to a minimum!
Dude, those cd's made great one time frisbees! Until they cracked, but then it was fun to break them!
119 and counting.. ;)
First of all, I'm not an AOL subscriber (and neither do those of my friends who I wish to talk to).
Yahoo! has already clarified many of my legitimate e-mails as junks, so that make s no big difference. If things are getting worse, I still have my gmail ready.
We've ever experienced that problem and have sent, or helped send many e-mails to AOL contacts over the years. But usually they are highly targeted, double opt-in contacts.
Why the frack should they change? To please you? You don't like how they access the net?
Allright Starbuck, here you go.
1. AOL's login takes too long.
2. AOL doesn't allow a lot of network traffic through.
3. AOL users get a lot more spam than everyone else.
4. AOL kicks for inactivity at random intervals.
5. AOL slimes your system with adverts and links to partners.
6. AOL requires you to use their mail system.
7. AOL's version of I.E. is terrible.
8. AOL is basically impossible to cancel.
9. AOL is slower than other dial-up connections. They used to lie about the connection speed, now it is just an issue of overhead.
10. AOL is now charging senders for incoming messages.
11. AOL sells its members list to spammers, even going so far as having a preferred spammer program.
12. AOL's software is buggy and has an annoying habit of crippling computers.
13. AOL charges more for dial-up than everyone else.
If you really think they should have DSL, just set them up with DSL and see if they like it. They're not going to change on their own even if they want to. It's up to you now.
The ______ Agenda
According to the article, it does not sound like that will be the case. It merely sounds like a way to have images and links on by default.
I realize that doesn't sound like much, but to an advertiser it is a *huge* deal. Time an again it has been shown that HTML emails garnish a much better click-through (and probably conversion) rate over plain-text messages. And if you can pay a small amount to ensure that the images and links will be seen by the recipient all the better.
I could be wrong about the end result, but frankly, it seems to me like it would be a bad business decision for AOL to just start dumping non-verified bulk mailings into the the user's spambox. If they did, there's no doubt that people would start complaining about missing e-mail and that would increase the possibility for them to loose more customers themselves.
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
Not if spam is defined well enough, which I admit is a non-trivial problem.
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
See the SpamHaus ROKSO list. Finding them isn't the problem.
(x) Microsoft will not put up with it
Microsoft has already been pursuing legal action against spammers. They're on our side here. Spam costs Hotmail a hell of a lot of money.
(x) The police will not put up with it
This is true, until Congress earmarks funding for it. Sorry, I forgot to specifically mention this requirement in my post.
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
Legal action doesn't require central authority over e-mail, it only requires authority over the spammer.
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
I shouldn't have said technical solutions are not the answer. Technical solutions are part of the answer. We're already using technical solutions to deal with this problem (RBLs).
(x) Asshats
Have something specific in mind?
(x) Jurisdictional problems
The majority of spammers are in the United States, and foreign governments have agreed to collaborate on this problem (I can't find a link now, but it was mentioned on Slashdot).
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
Who controls the armies? Those are the people that would be targeted.
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
Huge fines or jail time would make spam far less profitable.
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
Yeah, maybe. If a spammer can make it look like their spam came from an innocent party, that could be a problem.
(x) Technically illiterate politicians You got me on this one.
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves That's part of why what they're doing is illegal.
(x) Outlook Has nothing to do with this.
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical Nobody has allocated funding for it on the scale that would be required.
(x) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation Sorry, but I don't agree.
(x) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored Absolutely; this is one of the areas where technical solutions have trouble, but a legislative solution would work fine.
(x) I don't want the government reading my email They wouldn't have to.
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough As I understand it, jail is pretty slow.
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. If it doesn't, I'd be interested to see exactly why, and then go from there.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Oh not that I disbelieved you at all, if I tried to read everything here I'd never get anything done. (Wait...do I anyway?)
Slow down cowboy!
It's been 1 minute since you last successfully posted a comment.
Chances are, you are behind a firewall or proxy, or are typing with both hands. Please try again. If the problem persists, please try typing with your thumb up your ass.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
That's a nice email your list is sending out. It would be a shame it any of it went missing or rejected. You should get it insured. My brother Guiseppe, he runs a insurance firm that specialises in this area.
Simply request any AOL e-mail address that registers for your mailinglist to pay a $10 fee to offset costs of mailing to AOL. :P
Better yet, send the bill to the AOL billing department or such
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Even under AOL's current whitelist policy, it's not as "fine" as it used to be.
It used to be true that, once they filtered viruses, whitelisting meant your message would get delivered.
Today, there are about a half dozen circumstances that cause your mail to be rejected even if you're on the whitelist.
For example, if your message "contains a URL that is the subject of a number of complaints" your mail will be rejected even if you're whitelisted.
Unfortunately, AOL has a habit of deciding that some of their hosting competitors's domains are "the subject of a number of complaints" and blocking all sites in the domain.
One of our lists' mail was blocked because the list-owner's informational site was mentioned in the footer, and was hosted by Yahoo Geocities.
(And, of course, they don't tell you which particular AOL in your message they object to.)
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/03/05/spam.c harge.ap/index.html
--
what if?
ssh -l root matrix
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
That's something my (freemail!) provider does and it works pretty well:
Once you have manually transferred an e-mail by a certain sender from the junk bin to the regular inbox, that sender is on your personal whitelist. In the beginning it is a bit of a hassle, but after a short while all your buddies are cleared.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Here is the original story from 2003.
I can't imagine any other ISP giving in to such bullshit, so the end result will be the end of internet email for AOL users. I can't see this doing anything more than speeding up the revolutions, and tightening the circle that AOL is describing around the great plughole at the bottom of the Internet. And I for one shall cheer when they finally collapse, along with other cretinous "pay to play" fools who've never heard of the network effect or Metcalfe's Law. In the words of Pete Doherty: "Fuck 'em."
Please, tell me more about your methods...
Only thing is, the "unsolicited" part is probably as tenuous as it is for Email or phone spam. So long as you've had any interaction with the company or any of their subsidiaries...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Well, yes, for you, but there are some companies out there that are sending millions of legetimate emails a day...
I have interviewed for one some time ago. I am completely against spam, and do agree that their business is very legit. The only problem for them I can think of is that they send free daily newsletter to their customers. Their customers EXPECT these newsletters because they are on a very specific topic and are subscribed. From my understanding they are sending over a million emails to AOL addresses a day and growing... They are already on some whitelist from AOL which already complained of the amount of _legetimate_ email they send.
Now when you think about it. Those emails were signed-in BY the customers and are free. Who should pay? Should it be part of the customer's unlimited package? After all they have free 'unlimited' web surfing and all right? They are already paying for it part of their unlimited subscription package. Why should it be different?
In what is it different from Bellsouth requiring providers like google to pay for the traffic going to their end users??
After RTFA, it sounds like this whole token thing is a lot like the Habus Warrent Mark. I have yet to recieve a legit email with the Habus Warrent Mark. What is to stop spammers from forging a header under the GoodMail system?
Now correct me if I've missed something here... marketoids spend cash to snail mail me junk because they know there's a warm body at my mailbox. Spammers have less incentive per recipient, but it costs them so much less that it's worth it. (they only need to reach like 1 in 1000 to turn a buck) Now we are going to charge the spammers like a penny to send an email to someone, that they KNOW will get delivered and not junked, and that they KNOW has a warm body at the screen?
Aren't the spammers holding a champaign party after hearing this great news? This is not going to STOP spamming, it's going to make it WORSE by increasing the spammers' proffit margins.
If you're going to do this, do it for ANY proposed email to be sent, not just for any that is successfully delivered. That way they will still have to send a billion spams to get any hits, and they will be paying for all of those messags too. THAT will discourage them.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
First class mail is a part of the USPS. I do not live in that country. My tax dollars do not go to its government.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
In the US there are special envelopes which companies send out for this purpose. They're marked "Business Reply Mail" and have an account (actually, permit) number written on them to which the postage is charged.
Sadly, I've never seen AOL send out one. It's rather amusing though when you get credit card offers, to shove all the junk that's inside the envelope back into the BRM envelope and drop it back in the mailbox. It's not quite as good as being able to send somebody a brick, though.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Spammers do this already. The last few Viagra spams I've looked at (the ones that made it through my own filtering, as well as presumably the ISP's) had random sentences from what seemed to be 19th century English literature tacked to the bottom.
i t/index.html#000055
Othertimes it's just random words, which can be fairly amusing. In fact a blogger wrote a pretty good article on the "Dadaesque beat poetry" of the spammers:
http://www.markdery.com/archives/blog/invisible_l
Anyway, I assume that most spam filtering uses something a little 'fuzzier' than plain whole-message hashes, becuase there are messages in my GMail Spam folder right now that have these random words added.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I agree. And based on my reading of the article (not the summary, which -- not surprisingly -- sucks), they're not eliminating their whitelists altogether. It seems that right now they have two, a regular whitelist and a commercial whitelist, and it's the commercial whitelist that's being replaced by the pay-to-use service, while the regular whitelist (which is assumedly what you'd use if you were some organization that wanted to run a high-volume listserv) will still be there.
I've always thought that a workable email system would be one where it cost some very small amount of money to send emails to people who weren't suspecting them, but was free if you and the recipient set up some sort of trust relationship. E.g., if I wanted to email some random person on the net, it would cost me a fraction of a penny. Not very significant. For the majority of my emails, which are to people in my address book, I'd have set up a relationship with them so that it would be free (which might be as easy as sending a message and having them reply to it). The only people who would get hit with big charges are the ones who send a lot of emails out to unique, new address every day. I can't think of too many legitimate places where that happens, or where the legitimate use couldn't be replaced by the recipient first sending an email to the bulk sender first, so a relationship would be created and the fees would be waived. I think in practice this would require a lot more centralized control over the email system than I'd want or be comfortable with, however.
In general, I don't have any kind of inherent problem with pay-to-send email, as long as it only applies to bulk mail and there's some way to waive the fee when you can demonstrate that the recipient actually wants the emails.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Anyone have a link to AOL's Goodmail signup page? I can't see find it on their site, even under their email guidelines pages. Anyone?
Damien
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.
[...]
--
I may not agree with what you say, but I'll fight for your right to say it. That dosen't mean anyone has to listen.
oh, how rich!
One moment we hear about blocking all AOL users from your resources because of some vaguely-defined problem you have with "consumerism," and in the next we hear about how everyone should be able to express themselves in the manner of their choosing, even though you may not like their message. Double standard much?
People use AOL because it's easy for them to use, or there's no dial-up alternative where they live, or whatever. Nobody signs up for AOL because they think "hey, I'm an empty-brained corporate sheep; I know which ISP I'll choose!" And if you think you know what's best for everyone (and judging by the tone of your post, I'll bet you do) and take punitive measures against those who don't agree with you... well, in the real world those people are called fanatics, and are generally frowned upon.
the coolest club on
Good lord, you're right. That's precisely what the article says, at least. I am amazed (I know I shouldn't be, but whatever, I still am) at the amount of completely baseless ranting and general nonsense I had to read through to get to this post, the one comment so far that actually has a clue. I have mod points but you're already at five--although this warrants something more like "delete everything above this post" (probably to include the incediary and inaccurate text of the Slashdot article itself). What a circus.
It's good, but it's not good enough. You have to be skilled to set it up well to start with, and the skimming through spam subjects looking for false positives is a problem too. You requested the checkboxes, here they are:
You Personally advocate a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
(x) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a fascist for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
I saw "Goodmail" and immediate thought of the term "goodlife" from Fred Saberhagen's Beserker series. For those not familiar with it, goodlife is the term used by the semi-sentient machines out to destroy life in its various forms. A goodlife is a being (usually human) that assists the machines in return for not being exterminated.
Hence, the "goodmail" that assists AOL in continuing to survive will be allowed into the user's mail boxes, and everything else will be exterminated to the junk folder.
I guess it's time to add "aol.com" as another invalid e-mail string to my many applications.
[alk]
http://www.ahbl.org/funny/response1.php
:)
You can also find it on craphound.com as a txt file, but the php form is very useful.
(x) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it
won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular
idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to
state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
(x) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate
potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email
addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with
spammers
(x ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
(x) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
(x) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting
it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn
your
house down!
I think this is a great idea. Until it's unversally adopted however the AOL users will pay a steep price unfortunately.
But if this could be implemented universally and transparently. Say for example each month my outbound e-mail bill is incremented by a bit to pay for my sent e-mails it would kill spam dead. Sure there would still be spam from zombies but then those idiots would stop after the first monthly bill.
Even better would be a reciprocal system whereby if I read an e-mail other than the content then I refund the cost to the sender. that way legitimate senders are rarely charged. Specualtive sendors who try to send me welcome information are charged sometimes, and spammers or their zombies are charged routinely.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
"privilege of reaching AOL subscribers"
... another totally irrelevant /. post.
Think about it. Now think again.
Who cares?
You've got bill.
You can't handle the truth.
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
When a mailserver receives an incoming message attempt, it should accept the mail for delivery or reject it. If it accepts it for delivery and then later decides not to deliver the message, it should bounce the mail. (*)
IMHO, it is in no case acceptable for the incoming mailserver to claim that it's accepting an email for delivery, and then just silently drop the message.
(That's like a company mailroom signing for a package on your behalf, then throwing the package away without telling anyone. Saying that "email" is unreliable is like saying that "FedEx" is unreliable because some mail rooms throw away FedEx packages after signing for them.)
Anyone whose ISP or corporate mailserver is doing that should IMHO complain to their ISP or their IT department. At the very least, instead of saying things like "email is unreliable", folks should in that situation say the truth using statements such as "our corporate email system is unreliable."
Or moreso by confused admins who don't comprehend the importance of safely rejecting emails so that legitimate senders will know there was a problem.(*) Of course, nowadays it's a good idea to do these sorts of anti-spam or anti-forgery tests during the SMTP connection if at all possible, so that you don't contribute to bounce-spam.
I think the idea of the service provider determining whose e-mails get displayed how is fundamentally wrong. The user should decide for himself whose images and links he wants to have available, via a "Turn Images On" button, just like all other current e-mail clients. Even if a sender is "legitimate", who's to say I wouldn't want their images off by default?
If I were an AOL user, I would demand an option to send mail from anyone that had *paid* to send me mail to 'junk' (or outright refuse it) unless I specifically chose to accept it.
Similarly, I would demand the right to have mail that I *wanted* to receive to be accepted and delivered normally, regardless of wether the sender had paid AOL.
Thankfully, the odds of my ever using AOL for email are about the same as George Bush and Jerry Falwell flying to pluto together in a Cessna and getting a date with a pair of alien prostitutes with 6 legs and 2 heads.
Perhaps if they keep enacting dumb ass policies like this one, it might start to affect the user base that makes them so profitable, the people that just don't know any better. If it continues to grow in stupidity, even the stupid will see.
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I also fail to see how any of it's competitiors are "cheaper and reasonable" by any stretch of the word. Do you live in Bizarro world, where Comcast doesn't charge $60+ a month and cap your speeds at roughly double the dialup rate? Hmm... I have 3Mbit Verizon DSL. Checked regularly with DSL Reports, I have the speed I pay for. I get to use the browser I want. I pay $29/mo. AOL can suck it. (And btw, Comcast is $42/mo here in my area.) My first dialup account was AOL back in the early 90s...it was ok, but customer service sucked, and the connection was sketchy at best.
Actually, they're already paying for that to the USPS...
Unfortunately, most 4th class mail in the US is subsidized by higher prices on first class mail. So chances are, *you* are the one paying to ship all those CD's.
* Ok, for some spammers there _are_ technical differences, and that makes them easier to detect and reject - things like using open relays, or known zombies. But it's the less obvious spammers who are the problem. And some of the technical differences detectable about some spammers, such as running mail servers on home broadband machines, also disproportionately affect Linux users and other people who run real mail systems at home.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
One more reason to get Gmail. AOL should change their name to AHOLE. If they do email like they do their accounting you can watch this go down the toilet. After losing 99 BILLION dollars and staying in business, you can bet they want to charge for even looking at their logo. This 99 BILLION dollars was all barely reported in the media as well... http://news.com.com/AOL+loses+Ted+Turner+and+99+bi llion/2100-1023_3-982648.html/ But of course who is the owner of CNN, but AHOLE/Time Warner.
Our youth group painted the ceiling black and have a box for the members to put their unwanted CD's. We glue them (shiny side down) on the ceiling in a hexagon pattern, and it makes a nifty mirrory ceiling. Probably 60-75% of the CD's are AOL, and we've found some really cool boxes - from DVD-style to metal tins to even wooden-feeling compressed cardboard boxes. We've got about 400 up there, just 1500 to go...
You all have Oo.o and Firefox, so get World Wind.
There is a significant amount of misinformation regarding the topic of AOL, and in this case, CertifiedEmail as provided by Goodmail. AOL announced a partnership with Goodmail in October of 2005 and has been hard at work with the implementation of this new email enhancement.
AOL maintains a whitelist that is intended to facilitate bulk delivery from legitimate mailers. There is no fee for this service and it is widely available for any legitimate entity that abides by the terms and conditions as posted on the postmaster.aol.com website. There is no intention to make any policy or operational change to the whitelist.
The enhanced white list (EWL) was developed several years ago to help facilitate image and link rendering for bulk mailers that were on the whitelist and had exceptionally low abuse reporting rates. It is an automated process that is updated automatically and there is no application process; those that qualify get on until they no longer qualify and all others are excluded. This system was expanded numerous times to facilitate other operational objectives and having served those purposes is being strengthened to close the loopholes that lend it to gaming by those that do not meet the criteria previously set. The enhanced whitelist will remain as long as it is operationally beneficial to do so and in the best interest of our customers.
CertifiedEmail is a new class of email that allows mailers with exceptionally good mailing reputations to go through an accreditation process and when email is authenticated, have that email delivered to the inbox with images and links enabled by default. Additionally, this new class of email would be visually differentiated as such so that customers can recognize the links and images as safe. CertifiedEmail also carries with it a reporting mechanism that reports on successful deliveries providing the mailer with a delivery confirmation in the aggregate. It does not indicate open or read status.
There seems to be come confusion about the enablement of links and images as well. Enablement of links and images by default refers to a link being clickable without any further effort by the customer. An image refers to the actual image being displayed instead of a placeholder.
- When we enable links and images by default, links are clickable and images are displayed unless the customer has configured their mail controls to not display them.
- When we deliver email with links and images disabled, links are non-clickable and placeholders are used instead of the actual image. There are exceptions to this rule; if a user has listed the sender in their address book, the links and images are switched back on. If a user clicks on the "show images and links" command in their mail window, the images and links are switched back on. If a user tries to click on an image or link in the email, they are reminded that images and links are disabled and referred to the command link to enable them.
Inclusion on the whitelist is optional and only necessary for those that send bulk email (consider several hundred per day as bulk for this topic). If you send bulk email to AOL then you should apply for the whitelist; it is free and relatively quick to get completed. The enhanced whitelist is dynamic and changes daily; it is an operational tool that evolves with changing operational needs of fighting spam. CertifiedEmail might make sense for you if you need some degree of certainty beyond what normal email provides and or your ROI outweighs any implementation costs.
We do not see this as a replacement for spam fighting; it is an augmentation to identify email from accredited senders with a good mailing reputation for emails that have passed authentication. AOL users have seen a 75% reduction in the amount of spam and we hope to improve upon that further. CertifiedEmail is not intended to make legitimate marketers pay the way for spammers; they are paying in the form of judicial settlements and legal rulings and ja