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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."
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.
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.
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!
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.
in the end being charged to send emails to AOL users will just become another of the long list of reasons why AOL users have no friends and are the butt of many a joke...
This is a good thing? I'd rather keep all people who would use AOL in one, easy-to-block domain!
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 ...