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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.
...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
No...
The SENDER pays for the "privelege" of sending mail to AOL.
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
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
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'm sure people are just going to be lining up to pay AOL for the privilege of sending mail to its users. I'm also sure that users are not going to switch when they find out that their friends can't mail them because they or their ISP did not pay the AOL tax. Yes indeed, this plan is going to be so popular. I'm sure the spammers are just quaking in their gold-plated boots.
Bulk emailers on one hand and AOLers on the other? Let them have each other.
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.
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".)
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!
That's just FUD. AOL has not said that they are blocking all email that is not sent through GoodMail. They are replacing their whitelist with the service.
You don't need to be on the whitelist to send personal emails today, so you won't need to pay to send email tomorrow.
This only affects senders of bulk emails (mailing lists and spammers).
> ...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.....
Makes perfect sense to me. AOL saw all those spammers making so much money, they wanted a slice of the action. Now spammers have to pay a fee in order to reach AOL's customers.
Why would someone want to be an AOL customer again?
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.
Yes, opt-in lists are bulk. I had to jump through lots of hoops to get onto AOL's whitelist program just so that people who sign up to my web sites can get their confirmation email.
Once I got on it, it was fine (unlike Hotmail, which randomly drops emails on the floor, to the chagrin of my customers). We get a surprising number of AOL users who mistake the "this is spam" button for the "delete" button, but apparently not in large enough quantities to get us de-listed.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
What about my slashdot replies? Is slashdot a mailing list, or are those considered "personal" emails??? Is every OSS project with a sourceforge.net address going to get blasted by this?
I'm sure people are just going to be lining up to pay AOL for the privilege of sending mail to its users. I'm also sure that users are not going to switch when they find out that their friends can't mail them because they or their ISP did not pay the AOL tax. Yes indeed, this plan is going to be so popular. I'm sure the spammers are just quaking in their gold-plated boots.
I was agreeing with you until I realized you were being sarcastic. AOL has 19.5 million subscribers paying $21.95/month for the service; many of these customers have plenty of money and aren't very bright. Hell yes, companies will be willing to pay to send mail to these people.
AOL is losing customers - 6 million in the past three years - but I suspect this has largely been due to increased demand for broadband, rather than customer dissatisfaction. The rest of us may hate AOL's service, but their customers are generally happy - they just wish it was faster.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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.
But its very easy to get blacklisted by AOL. Just need a couple people to report you as spam. They don't even tell you they are blocking you. You just start not being able to send. AOL will now have every incentive to blacklist companies so they can generate more income.
No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style.
No this affects mailing lists, not spammers.
If they want to block spam they can use filters. Spam these days tends to come from millions of zombie windows boxes - they'll continue to send small volumes of mail to AOL from forged email addresses and be completely unaffected by this.
Large companies will pay because, presumably, the cost will be less than their average profit per email.
The folk who will be left in the cold will be those that host free mailing lists - that could be your local church, local voluntary associations, schools, folk who freely manage topical lists of interest etc. These folk won't make back the money because email isn't a revenue stream. They're the only ones who will see any effect.
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.)
Actually, this seems to only apply to their "enhanced" whitelist, which allows commercial senders to embed links and images in emails. It doesn't seem to affect the standard whitelist for legitimate non-commercial bulk mailers like mailing lists.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
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
...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.
Mailing lists that are otherwise free might like to either prevent AOL users altogether, to avoid complaints that come from users if legitimate mail gets marked as junk -- or impose an appropriate subscription fee for AOL users to join, in order to cover the expenses of "Goodmail" status for the list, and the administrative costs related to collecting the fees.
When AOL users see that they will have to pay to join certain popular mailing lists that are available through other ISPs for free, they may be encouraged to switch to a provider that provides fairer options of classifying potential spam.
I'm 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.
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.
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.
Tends to be a drag when you're running a legitimate mailing list and somebody can't be bothered to look at the procedure for getting unsubscribed ... and suddenly emails to everybody at his ISP start bouncing, and the people who aren't getting their mails think it's because YOU screwed something up.
It also happens when somebody explicitly sets up a ~/.forward on your system (on their account) to forward all their mail somewhere else. Which seems reasonable, but then they go reporting spams received wherever they read their mail, and that system decides that `oho! This site must be an open relay! Look at the Received: headers!' and submits you to a RBL without even bothering to try and forward a spam through your system.
There's lots of knee-jerk reactions going on out there in the name of `fighting spam'. Perhaps they're the right thing to do most of the time, but not all the time. And trying to convince somebody that they made a mistake? Fergetabout ...
Anyone who isn't on the whitelist will probably not be affected by this. Most servers are not on the whitelist. Getting on it is about as easy as getting Dell or Netgear tech support to send you replacement gold bars in the mail.
The people this will really affect have servers that simply forward mail. We host commerce sites for people who don't know anything about the internet or what to do with it. They receive mail at their domains, and then we forward it to their AOL accounts, which they actually know how to check. We need to be whitelisted because if we aren't, we get blocked for forwarding any spam that our clients get at their domain accounts.
The users control what is marked spam, so it's not reasonable to expect them to understand when you tell them repeatedly not to mark messages as junk any goddamn more please.
Another note: a few months ago, AOL spontaneously started bouncing mails that had UNCLICKABLE URLs in them. So if you typed a URL in plain text, you got bounced. Real funny, I swear.
Oh, and I'm trademarking "Greenlisting"
I just got on their "whitelist". They sent me a confirmation email, saying how they will deliver the messages but they do not guarantee the fact that the user is actually going to get them in their Inbox since their junk mail filter is apparently configured based on individual settings.
Well fuck, if AOL thinks I am going to PAY them in order to reach their "users", AOL is wrong. I will give these users an email account with me. Come to think of it, I'll do that with Verizon's customers too, at least until Verizon learns how to detect spam.
Goodmail my ass.
Z
Again, I hope your grandparents live to be 500, but when anyone gets around the 80s you should be thinking very seriously and often about how things will be handled. I wouldn't wish the ugly ways it can go on anyone.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
There's a very fine line between your average mailing list and your average spammer. One man's mailing list is another man's spam.
No, there is NOT a fine line.
Mailing lists are always positive opt-in. And they have an easy opt-out mechanism. And they specifically contain information that the recipient has requested. Often, they even echo back messages that the recipient has contributed to the discussion threads.
How is this in any way a 'fine line' differentiation from spam?
I'm becoming afraid that anti-spam ranting and hatred takes away peoples' common sense.
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, 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
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.