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AOL and Yahoo to Offer Filter Circumvention
tiltowait wrote to mention a report on MSNBC's site stating that AOL and Yahoo are both planning to introduce a for-pay way to circumvent their spam filters. From the article: "The fees, which would range from 1/4 cent to 1 cent per e-mail, are the latest attempts by the companies to weed out unsolicited ads, commonly called spam, and identity-theft scams. In exchange for paying, e-mail senders will be guaranteed their messages won't be filtered and will bear a seal alerting recipients they're legitimate."
p.s. I can't wait until I start seeing the 'seal alerting recipients they're legitimate.' attached as a gif file to spam in my inbox.
See Antispam group rejects e-mail payment plan for more reactions.
I had to read the story twice before realizing it wasn't a hoax.
While charging for reliably sending e-mail may be a good way to fight spam, putting the onus on the sender to pay isn't that great an idea.
I run an opt-in, non-profit, ad-free announcement list, for example. I just checked and there are 521 AOL and Yahoo addresses subscribed. I'm not going to pay $5 a day to reach those people!
I don't know how AOL filters work, but ideally a user could whitelist an address. But the pay-for-bypass method seems designed around reaching users that *don't* specify they want the "priority" spam.
Just how many boxes of this checklist does this plan grossly violate?
trash "certified" email.
Thank you for trying our software.
AOL and Yahoo would get a cut of the fees charged by Goodmail.
What a surprise that AOL & Yahoo are doing this. They can proclaim that they are "fighting spam" and be paid for it at the same time. This does absolutely nothing to stop the zombie networks hemorrhaging spam or the bulk mailers in countries with lax - no UCE laws.
The money doesn't pass to the user receiving the 'solicited' commercial bulk mail, but rather to the email provider. This will simply create a new class of "legitimate" spam; equivalent to the "Addressed to Occupant" bulk mail that floods the snail mailbox.
Until a spammer pays?
Of course what they really mean is that the fees are an attempt by these companies to make money from spam.
The new scheme doesn't do anything to weed out spam, since the existing spam filters remain in place. All the new scheme does (as the /. headline "AOL and Yahoo to Offer Filter Circumvention"
accurately reflects, unlike the AOL and Yahoo marketing
doublespeak) is to give senders with money a leg up and a
"privileged" level of access to the end users' mailboxes.
Thanks, I hadn't hear of spam before. These kids have such groovy slang today!
Seems to me the services offered should be included free of charge by any respectable email dealing company.
Spam outbreak or not, why exactly should the sender pay to fix a problem that is inherent to their business (Yahoo's and AOL's) ?
Superb Hosting
Say, dat's a nice email message you got there. It would be a shame if some spam filter caught it. ;)
In exchange for paying AOL/Yahoo, e-mail senders will be guaranteed their messages won't be filtered by AOL/Yahoo, and will bear a seal marked BAYES_90,HTML_AOL_SEAL,HTML_YAHOO_SEAL.
(The mailserver said she'd borne a seal. I said filter the damn spam and leave my wife's private life out of it, OK, pal?)
So I suppose the next thing would be a 1/4 to 1 cent charge to the users to have the bypass-spam get re-filtered.
Its all about the might $!
Didn't a company called Javien try out a micropayment system for Spam emails back in early 2001? Hyperion or something I thought it was called. Instead of the ISP charging for emails, email account owners could charge back to spammers willing to give them $coin$ to send their message.
Personally, I would rather receive a few dollars for spammers to send me emails. Since I get over 400 a day, if I charged a cent a spam, that would mean $1460 a year just to receive spam.
Bout time they started charging back the costs of handling spam, but I think it's in the wrong hands...
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
I was gonna call dupe-sies but the Yahoo bit is new.
Zonk should've added
Previously covered here.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
At that price, a spammer can still shotgun emails to a list of those who have at least clicked on the ads before. The filters will be less effective because of this. I'll start being scared the day that Mozilla starts taking payments to let people get around Thunderbird's junk filter...
All your emails are belong to us!
Extend your marketing budgets, cut us in, or else.
Superb Hosting
He probably spends more than that in a day on hotdogs and beer!
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
I can't wait to see what happens when someone steals a credit card to phish more credit card numbers out of clueless AOL users. "The email came with the little icon that said it was legit, of course I had to verify my account details!"
I read the internet for the articles.
At least google's official "spam" spams you off to the side with ads that are actually for products, in a way that is inobtrusive.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
1. "Companies that don't want to pay a fee will be able to send e-mail to Yahoo and AOL members exactly as they have in the past, Graham and Mahon said."
2. AOL and Yahoo "tighten" their filters to start excluding legitimate business emails.
3. Profit!
Seriously.
Now they can pay to have their emails sent to guaranteed valid addresses, charge more for their "service" and they now have some legitimacy because, well, they PAID for the access!
...will turn your computer into a zombie mail relay, but also use keyloggers to steal your credit card number to automatically pay AOL the spam fee.
Slices, dices, eats your lunch.
I can envision e-tailers like Dell or Amazon using it when they mail out invoices or software vendors using it to mail out registration keys.
But it's probably not cost-effective for shotgun spamming, certainly too expensive for penis enlargement and Viagra hustlers. Those folks won't want their names/banking info on file anyway.
Unsolicited email, even when the greaseball spammer pays some corporate goon to do so, is still unsolicited. You didn't ask me, you didn't pay me, therefore you're still a gutter dwelling spammer. Even with the corporate stamp of approval.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
This obviously will allow targeted spammers to pay for "Legitimate" flags, so what are they going to do to prevent this?
Nothing. It will likely be more profitable to ignore. AOL and Yahoo customers likely assume that spam is just a part of life.
Do emails get completely blocked, "possibly" tagged as spam, or are links+images stripped out?
I've seen people claim all three using wild suppositions, so please have some solid evidence to back up your claim...
Please help metamoderate.
...until the companies themselves start selling our emails?
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
This isn't a TOTALLY bad idea... it's just not cutting everyone in on the action who needs to be benefitting, namely the account holder. Yahoo! would clean up in a heartbeat if they announce that they will divvy up the fee they collect so that the account holder gets a slice.
I'd take 500 Yahoo!mail spamaccounts if Yahoo cut me in for a penny on every spam that made it to my inbox. If they really want this to succeed, they need to come up with a Yahoo!SpamRewards(tm) program and allow JoeBlowEndUser2341 to cash in. Who needs a retirement plan?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Actually I've always wondered why the retailers the pay for spam to be sent out aren't targeted. The spammer is, quite honestly, the middleman. If we attack the head (the company paying the spammer), spam should be reduced.
Does anybody know if there is a blacklist of these companies? I'd love to add their names to my proxy to block anybody from my office from going back to their sites.
Might take a bit longer to kill the problem, but anything would help...
In exchange for paying, e-mail senders will be guaranteed their messages won't be filtered and will bear a seal alerting recipients they're legitimate.
If it bears this seal
I guarantee you that it is legitimate!
Yeah right.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I just can't quite imagine many banks paying to send alerts and reminders and ads to their existing customers. Sure as shooting they'd pass it on if they had to, but they'd rather just ignore it altogether and let the customer complain to the ISP if mail doesn't arrive.
If no bank or any legitimate emailer is going to pay it, who will?
I just can't see anybody paying this.
Infuriate left and right
I don't see how this will combat spam in the least, but I certainly don't see it helping spammers either. So I don't know why I should even care about this. Hell, if they want to make a quick buck off spammers willing to shell out the money then so be it, less money in the spammer's pockets. AOL/Yahoo are in a position to do this because of the money they have spent in the past building a large user base. If it does turn out to make the situation worse for users, or legit people trying to contact their users...I am confindent the free market remedy it given time. The PR backlash alone of them blocking a significant ammount of legit email would be nasty for them, even outside of the users that would leave BEFORE the backlash convinced others to jump ship too.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Anyone else have a feeling of deja vu? (Today is the 7th, the original article was posted on the 2nd. Five days -- most people probably still have their comments in their history page. Quick, do a copy-paste -- double that karma!)
I'll sum up the most salient points I remember from the other discussion:
-AOL will still have a whitelist for non-commercial mailinglists and the like to add themselves to, if they want to include a large number of AOL members
-Messages which aren't on the whitelist or who don't pay for Goodmail service will have their images and links removed
-The biggest (legitimate) user of this service would seem to be profit-generating promotional emails, like the ones that get sent out by airlines, travel agencies, etc.
-The general hivemind concensus seems to be that nobody likes AOL anyway, and this is just another reason to avoid dealing with them
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
While many people may cry foul, thinking that this is an expensive price tag, think about the people who would benefit most from this. Companies who have traditionally relied on mass mailings to announce things or update there customers will benefit from this substantially. Authentication that the e-mail is from who it says it is, and at a fraction of the price of snail mail. Although i do forsee that there will be several bugs to work out on this.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
This isn't such a bad idea, but it really hinges on whether or not the main base of spam gangs currently operating will jump on board. If so, then it could be very beneficial, as the community would have less UCE, bandwidth and resource theft and virus/trojan/worm activity would probably decrease dramatically (because people in the industry know that most of this activity is done by spammers). Plus with a new endorsement system, ISPs could more easily filter the mail if they wish, or they could use it as a profit source.
However, if the spam gangs don't embrace this idea, then all that's going to result is a new wave of pseudo-legitimate spammers, most likely popular corporations, will add to the already substantive noise level of e-mail traffic.
At this point, I can't imagine this scheme working, but nonetheless, it will all have to do with whether or not enough major systems (Hotmail, Gmail, yahoo, etc.) jump on board. If you have enough cooperation from the large free e-mail services, it could be a practical approach.
See RFC 3514.
does it make it any less spam-like?
No.
It's still spam, but the network provider is taking a cut of the profits to betray you.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
...if all it did was affect those sending millions of spam messages, but instead it picks on the little guy, who even at such a low rate, can't afford to send out too many mailings. This will hurt non-profits and charitites the most. And it won't stop the spammers anyway; they'll forge the ids/addresses of "good" email customers and send their mail pouring through anyway.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
I have a free (as in beer) e-mail account with Yahoo. They bear the financial impact of spam, not me. If this let's them defer some of that cost, what do I care?
They will probably care later as I quickly learn that their seal of approval is another level of spam and start automatically deleting it. But until then I wish them well. After all the e-mail service is costing me nothing.
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
One of the unfair aspects of spam is that the receiver pays the cost of transmitting and reading the spam. The spammer pays almost nothing to "advertize". Contrast this with traditional advertizing methods where the advertizer must pay a fee to have their ad carried on TV or in a newspaper.
AOL's users are going to be spending quite a bit of their online time deleting spam messages, so it's fair for AOL to cut them into the deal. If a spammer pays AOL a penny to send a spam to a single user, then it's fair for AOL to credit their account by perhaps half a penny. They could even cap it so that the most an AOL user would get is free service for agreeing to receive spam.
Wasting people's time without compensation is just wrong and annoying. Compensating people for their time to receive advertizing is fair. Anyone who wants to continue just paying their subscription could just decline to sign up for the service. Nobody should be automatically signed up for this. The default should be not to get spam.
Didn't they think of this, or am I just smarter than them? Makes me wonder.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
The problem with the scheme isn't that it's charging for e-mail; ultimately that's the only plan I'm aware of that has any chance of working. (See http://www.pobox.com/~meta/pages/spam for my rationale for that statement.)
No, the problems with this scheme are:
- No provision for non-profit entities (e.g. mailing lists I run for friends, etc.)
- The amount isn't set by the appropriate party (i.e. the only person qualified to determine how much it should cost you to send me mail, is me.)
- The criteria aren't set by the appropriate party (i.e. similarly, the only person qualified to determine whether a given source of mail *should* be subject to this charge/filtering in order to send to my mailbox, is me.)
- Doesn't scale (if every ISP does it, you have to pay every ISP, billing/paying costs become ridiculous, etc)
There may be other problems too, for example AOL's implementation may be insecure. In fact, I'm guessing it will be.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
But lots of people use free Yahoo mail as a disposable contact address, and I run a small social mailing list that already has occasional trouble reaching Yahoo subscribers, using majordomo on a friend's static-DSL Linux box. At least Yahoo has the decency to bouncegram some mail it's rejecting, which apparently AOL doesn't. Unfortunately, it doesn't provide useful feedback about what it's objecting to, and doesn't have useful contacts other than the abuse@yahoo blackhole to ask about it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Unlike most people on Y! mail, I pay for it. Don't really use it much anymore (in particular since gmail), and it's coming up for renewal soon. Wasn't much of an argument to keep it, so this is the nail in the coffin.
I'm not paying for spam. Bad enough their filtering is shit in the first place. It will not filter email that's not addressed to your Y! address.
I forward mail to it from my mailserver so I can check it on the road if need be. So all the junk that hits that address passes right through to Y! as it is.
What really pissed me off was I spent forever training it with thousands of spams that had acrued and the only message it marked as bulk was legit. After much back and forth, I finally got an answer.
--
Dear XXX
We appreciate you following up with us. We have received your
communication regarding SpamGuard.
SpamGuard is designed to operate with your Yahoo! Mail account and is
not optimized for external accounts that are forwarding to your Yahoo!
Mail account. If you forward messages to your Yahoo! Mail account, we
suggest that you create filters which will route these messages to a
specific folder.
--
Which of course, with their filters being limited in number and functionality, it's not practical.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
First let me point out Bonded Sender. THis is not the same, but has the same effect. It is essentially putting up a bond (a few thousand dollars usually for even the slightest volume) and in doing so, you say "for every Spam message you get, take something from the bond to compensate yourself for it". This is a way for legitimate senders (CNN, Mailing lists, Slashdot, Microsoft's security updates, newspapers, etc) to white-list their e-mail with those recipients who follow this white-list (Hotmail, MSN, RoadRunner, etc for example, is one who does). It puts the "we swear we're not sending Spam, and we'll put money on it".
http://www.bondedsender.com/fees.html shows their rates (for If it costs $12.50 for 5000 users (1/4 cent per e-mail), to make big e-mail providers (particularly webmail providers) to like their e-mail, that's a legitimate cost to the cover and drinks they'll make off of each person. If it brings in one person it's probably worth it.
These folks aren't Spammers, in the same way that when you sign up for news on CNN or your favourite software company, they're not Spammers either. People _WANT_ and _CHOOSE_ to get their mail. It is BULK mail, and I'll admit that (bulk not meaning junk). Spam filters continue to get smarter in knowing the difference between Spam, Bulk, and Personal mail. Personal mail is sent by a user. Bulk mail is things you want like newsletters. Spam offers a bigger penis through the use of Viagikra *sic*.
ISPs that group bulk and Spam into one category are missing the point of a Spam filter. It is not to keep bulk e-mail out but to be programmed to determine what the mail someone wants (or may want) to read and something that is unsolicited. The solicited/unsolicited mix is the important one.
Person-to-person mail is good.
Solicited mail is good.
Unsolicited commercial e-mail is bad.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
While transmitting the passwords in a reversible encryption scheme protects against third party eavesdroppers, it does not protect against rogue servers.
Traditional Unix passwords are stored using an irreversible encryption scheme, but must be transmitted from client to server in the clear (or using a reversible scheme).
Samba and CHAP passwords are transmitted using an irreversible encryption scheme, but must be stored in the clear, which makes them vulnerable to compromise of the password data base.
Now, I've found a method which allows to have it both ways:
- passwords may be stored with an irreversible scheme.
- transmission is done using a challenge-response system which does not reveal password or password-equivalent hashes
The method is a variant of Diffie Hellman key exchange, relying on the difficulty of calculation a discrete logarithm. Let p be the pasword, g a generator and Q a large safe prime. g and Q are constants in the algorithms.- Passwords are stored as g^p mod Q
- When authenticating a client, the server picks a secret k, only known to itself. It transmits C=g^k to the client as a challenge.
- The client calculates R=C^p, which is equal to g^pk
- Upon receipt, the server strips k by raising the client's response to the 1/k th power: g^p = R^(1/k)
- Finally it compares g^p against the stored hash g^p
Benefits: The server cannot the client to another server authenticating against the same password base, because at no time it knows p. Even if the server machine is compromised, passwords are still safe, even if unwitting clients logged in during the compromise.This post was brought to you by the antisoftpat fairy. If, several years from now, you use this as prior art to bust an obnoxious software patent, please chant three times "de Juncker as ee Kallef, a gehéiert oofesaat!" as a thank you gesture for the fairy ;-)
If you didn't want to get any of their certified spam couldn't you use the new "seal alerting recipients they're legitimate" as a custom identifier for a spam filter? Seems it would unite all this mail under one common signal allowing easier removal.
I'll give it a month or two to see how it goes, but if this results in more spam getting my inbox, I'm going to finally resort to switching to Gmail. I've got a gmail address, but I just like Yahoo's interface much more. The effectiveness of their spam blocker has always been one reason I like them - if that goes away, I'll go through the supreme pain in the ass that would be switching all my crap over to a new email address after using this one for at least a good six or seven years.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Slashdot to offer dupe protection as well?
Businesses already pay more for internet services and one of the reasons was for sending more email.
Now it seems the ISPs want more money and they think its alright to hold the emails that businesses send as hostage. Pay up or your business thru email will fail. They have the control over what they consider spam. So its either pay them what they want or they will consider you spam.
They need to make every computer have an IP Address locked to it. Then that could be attached to every email sent. If the receiver then thinks its spam, they can send it to their ISP for further review. If it is determined that the email is spam, the attached IP Address can be filtered and all ISPs can be notified of that particular address. If legal action is required, they would be able to find the computer that is sending spam and shut them down.
Businesses shouldn't have to pay more, the ISPs just need to make it where emails must include where they come from.
Given the large userbase of AOL and Yahoo!, this should be a good test of just how much "stink", people are willing to put up with. In my experience with their premium service, Yahoo! does a pretty good job of keeping spam out of my inbox. Typically, I'll get maybe two a day that escape filtering. If that number were to triple or quadruple, I might begin to think about another service. So legitimizing some spam this way, definitely carries a risk of customer loss.
Also interesting is the likelihood that the filtering efforts of AOL and Yahoo! are effective enough that mass mailers would be willing to pay fees to get around it. It makes one wonder if there is some suppressed technology that would effectively kill all spam, but The Man is keeping it under wraps, like the 100 mile/gallon carburetor of decades past. Very effective filtering may be what makes it possible for AOL and Yahoo! to get a bigger piece of the spam dollar than they probably already do.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
37 cents for a stamp, that doesn't stop spam from showing up in my snail mail box.
CNet news recently posted an article on this same topic. Two points got my attention, one has to do with privacy and the other with the payment process.
PRIVACY
From the CNet Article, "as any company that used the service would have to show that under antispam laws, they had the right to send the e-mails." How the heck to they intend to verify this? To me this sounds like mail senders must divulge Opt-in/opt-out records to Yahoo! and AOL in order to get permission to use the certified email. If my assumption is true, this program could result in breaches of privacy policies and potentially lead to MORE spam if permission lists are being e-mailed around. If my assumption is not true, and Yahoo! and AOL will simply depend on a statement of compliance by the sender, then this program is nothing more than a money-making crock! Anyone can say they comply with CAN-SPAM. "Trust but verify" comes to mind.
PAYMENT PROCESSING
On this point, I'm wondering how payment for emails will be collected. Do senders prepay and buy a block of "stamps", or do they get billed for the messages after the fact. In either case, the potential for abuse here is great. What's to prevent someone for buying a prepaid block of "stamps" and reselling them? What's to prevent someone from creating a shell company, satisfying the "verification" process, sending a bunch of spam, and then closing down shop before the bill comes.
I'm reserving final judgment until more details come out, but if this idea does come to pass, my business will stop allowing users to register using Yahoo! or AOL email accounts. And yes, every one of my business's emails comply with CAN-SPAM.
...that is, anywhere but on the internet, wouldn't this be called "extortion"?
disclaimer: This is a real question, not rhetorical. I could admittedly be wrong.
My parents' Yahoo address has been filtered when they sent something to my address. They mass-emailed pictures of my son to about fifty people, and all the Yahoo users had to dig it out of their junk mail folders to view it. When Yahoo's spam filters are that restrictive, one must wonder just how many people will simply stop sending to Yahoo.
I'm not affected by this any more. $5 a month for domain hosting means never having to worry about good e-mail getting flagged as spam.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
All I can see is that this might decrease the profit margins of spammers somewhat. Perhaps not even enough to be notable for them. In fact, with the e-mails being certified as well, there's actually an incentive for spammers to pay, because that "certificiation" will make the sheep think that they've just recieved something good and legit rather than some crappy spam mail.
Unless Goodmail is privately held by people or organizations not looking to profit, it shouldn't be too hard for the spam cartel to buy up a stake and subvert it for their own purposes.
Christopher S. 'coldacid' Charabaruk -- coldacid.net
e-mail senders will be guaranteed their messages won't be filtered and will bear a seal alerting recipients they're legitimate.
If I didn't ask for it, it's not legitimate. Period.
Junk mail is junk mail, regardless of who it's from.
The Internet is generally stupid
If the spammers want to pay me a penny for every spam they send me I guess that'd be fine with me. I'd still set up a filter to get rid of them tho.
that this might be just more M$ FUD? This is an article from M$NBC after all. Maybe not? FTR, I'm not entirely sure what the market shares are for this particular service, and I'm not sure anymore just who owns who (except of course, Google owns GMail - they do, right?). So maybe I'm off track here.
AOL has long provided business partners the ability to "white list" their domain - bypassing the SPAM filters. Now they're just charging companies to do it.
-gary, ex-AOL product manager
1. Opt-in to program
2. Post your email address everywhere.
3...
4. Ungodly profit!
Bury me in mashed potatoes.
If they want to receive your newsletter, they'll get AOL and Yahoo to let you through for free, or they'll move elsewhere.
Customers can't always move elsewhere without actually moving elsewhere. In many places, the only broadband provider is RoadRunner (owned by same corporate parent as AOL) or SBC (who has partnered with Yahoo!). AOL's dial-up coverage also tends to be better than other nationwide ISPs, which is important to users who travel far from public wireless hotspots.
Tell me, does ANYBODY read TF articles anymore, or do people just rely on the oh-so-inaccurate summary of the story? AOL and Yahoo are not going to permit people to send spam. They're going to give senders of opt-in email a way to avoid spam filters. Spammers aren't willing to pay money; their business would become entirely unprofitable. On the other hand, people who send opt-in email currently have to expend resources trying to avoid spam filters that should not be applying to them. So, like all voluntary free market transactions, AOL and Yahoo are splitting the difference. They're giving opt-in senders a way to reduce their costs and increase reliability (important for transactional email) in exchange for being paid to set up the special infrastructure necessary to ensure that they and only they are able to evade the spam filters.
Disclosure: I have consulted for Goodmail Systems' qmail implementation to be used by Yahoo.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
"The fees, which would range from 1/4 cent to 1 cent per e-mail, are the latest attempts by the companies to weed out unsolicited ads, commonly called spam, and identity-theft scams. In exchange for paying, e-mail senders will be guaranteed their messages won't be filtered and will bear a seal alerting recipients they're legitimate."
So they claim that this is an "attempt to weed out unsolicited ads." That's gotta be the most blatant lie I've heard in awhile.
So what they want us to believe is that if they allow some spam (let's call it the "good spam") to bypass their spam filters the amount of total spam will be reduced? And the way it becomes "good spam" is by the spammer paying a fee! What a crock.
This is just an attempt to implement the "Microsoft postage scam" in a round about way. Next they can announce that either they won't do any filtering at all making regular non-paying email hopelessly lost in the ocean of spam or they can just out and out stop the delivery of any free email.
This is NOT "the latest attempt to weed out unsolicited ads." This is the latest attempt by big corporations to increase their bottom line.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
I'm sure it's the dumb user who can't figure out what unsolicited mail is, and not you guys. Putting a useless unsubscribe link on the bottom does not make it magically solicited, only more legal.
If I get a survey I did not request, it will be reported as spam: unsolicited electronic mail. It wouldn't surprise me at all if spammers have a more generous definition of what spam is.
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
So let's say Dell buys into this and pays to skip Yahoo's spam filter. You buy a computer from Dell, they send you an invoice. WHY would you deserve money for that service? If anything, you should be paying Yahoo (as you do with ad views).
But companies who are legit would not be doing that in the first place, right?
If I block all zombie emailers from my users, then offer companies access to my users for a fee, as long as they don't use zombies
This will not cut down on the crappy ads.
This is nothing more than the ISP's attempt to sell access to their users.
If you're running a smart company's ads, then you already take precautions against being blocked/blacklisted.
The money doesn't pass to the user receiving the 'solicited' commercial bulk mail, but rather to the email provider.
Yes it does, in the form of delays in the inflation of subscription fees. Value also passes to the customer in the time-is-money sense because with less of a risk of false positives, a customer can run the spam filter at a stricter setting.
The way this will reduce spam is that it will allow AOL and Yahoo to make their filtering more aggressive. Since more email will be identifiable as opt-in (because it has a Goodmail Systems signature), AOL and Yahoo will have a lessened risk of false positive matches. The reason the senders are willing to pay to evade the filters is that they're ALREADY doing that, by being forced to craft their messages so they don't look like spam.
Goodmail Systems doesn't want to see its business destroyed, so it will keep very close track of whose emails generate complaints. If they get too many complaints, they will refuse to sign further messages from that company.
Disclaimer: I have consulted for Goodmail Systems' qmail implementation, and they paid me money for my software. They didn't pay me to tell the truth about what they're doing. That I'm doing because I'm a Quaker.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
My mother does that and gets crappy little gift cards worth a fraction of the money she could earn in a job working the same number of hours.
Well at least she can get a job. A lot of people can apply for employment at 50 different restaurants and, despite best effort, get zero job offers.
Don't get your panties in a bunch, folks. It will be marked as "approved" by yahoo. Simply configure your spam filter to weed out spam that bears this "seal of approval" and everything's fine again.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You'd probably want to, at random intervals, ask for the user to fill in a captcha or something similar to that.
Are publicly traded companies of that size, who likely even have a government contract or two, allowed to discriminate against blind customers?
Of course, it wont stop spam. This is marketing bullshit.
.1% chance that it will end up as a false positiv is prohibitiv. This leads to such stupid things as people sending a mail, then calling and asking if the other one got their email.
But one of the biggest problems with spam isn't the spam itself, that's just an annoyance. The biggest problem is that spam-filters have made email unreliable.
Today, when I send a message, I'm not sure if the recipient will get it or if it will end up as a false positiv. And for some buisiness mails, even a
Now, this scheme can prove interesting as it give buisiness a way to guarantee delivery of crucial email.
And for thoose crying "extortion" : snail mail already does this : for a fee, they will deliver the mail directly to the person and collect their signature, thereby granting guaranteed delivery. And they advertise that they care more about these mails, so that there is less chance of them "getting lost".
So : this does nothing to fighting spam, but guaranteed delivery is still interesting.
On the other hand, if they really remove their spam-filter and only deliver white-listed and paid-for mail to the inbox and everything else to the spam folder (like I read in another article about this plan), now, this would actually make spam worse, as it would increase the number of false positives so much that everybody would have to read their spam-box anyway.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof for my post which this sig is too small to contain.
Sure...they want to profit off of email and spam, but there is a bigger and more ugly reason that this type of thing is pushing forward, find out the REAL reason they are making a push toward paid email here: http://infowars.com/articles/science/internet_doom sday_for_internet.htm
Legitimate spam? And how is that better than fake spam?
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
I agree completely. I run a company that markets bargain items through email, and I don't see why I'd bother paying to use this "trusted" email thing to reach potential customers. We can just buy email lists and send for free, so why bother?
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
Significantly, there's nothing in there I wanted that the main SpamAssassin spam filters would have rejected. So, except for spammers, Bonded Spammer has no value. If you have a Bonded Sender rule in your spam filters, it might be of modest value, but definitely do not let it bypass the filters, like Ironport's patches will make it. Ironport's patch to SpamAssassin gives Bonded Spammer mail a spam value adjustment of -100. Try +1 instead.
Are you really that stupid or is missing points your life's work? This is'nt the emperors new clothes as anybody here can say the emperor is buck nekkid and not get his head lifted! This is a bald faced attempt by AOL and Yahoo to extract money from their users for using e-mail. What is unique is that it comes in the form of a protection racket in reverse. If you are on some mailing list, you will have to pay to get your mail...'pay to NOT be censored ('protected'). Given all government censoring and mail opening, why shouldn't private enterprise get involved and do a little censoring and mail opening of its own. Given that AT&T, Cingular, and MCI are freely donating all your private business to the NSA, like fellow jackals why should'nt they and other corporations also partake of whats left of the corpse of your privacy. And you thought that Al Gore was somehow protecting you when he got behind the Telecommunications Act of 1996?! He always was a republican masquerading as a democrat.
Now if you are into a hobby like genealogy and have to for some reason use AOL or YAHOO.....like you don't own a computer and have to use one in the public library or your friend's house.....then you are in for a good screwin as you will have to pay for all the mail you recieve that you want; and then you will have to pay for the real spam as well. WELCOME TO THE MODERN WORLD OF HOMELAND SEEEKURITY. AIN'T YA GLAD YA VOTED REPUBLICAN?
Myself, and the president of the team in question (who just happens to be an AOL user) have both complained. It works for a month or two, and then they are rejecting again.
I love providing a service to my cycling team, but it's almost to the point where I'm going to have to tell AOL users to find another way. It's sad, because they are a significant portion of my user community.
Shame on AOL and Yahoo for thinking up a way to make money for nothing rather than improving the user experience by investing in anti-spam efforts.
As usual, Ed Felten has some insightful commentary about this on his blog. Interestingly, he ties this to the recent stories about ISPs giving favored treatment (for a fee) to certain net traffic over others. How does the AOL/Yahoo proposal fit in? Here's Felten's take on it:
Felten thinks that market forces will either make this work or not work, assuming that competition exists. If people have a hard time getting the e-mail they want under AOL/Yahoo because they keep getting sucked up into overly-agressive filters, they'll go elsewhere.
Anyone know whether Yahoo and AOL will accept payment via (stolen) paypal accounts?
They are taking a chapter right out of banks' playbooks, who have been ratcheting up ATM fees. First we had the ATM transaction fee, then we could pay a monthly fee instead of transaction fees, and now we have the worst of all worlds -- both! After we all paid the banks to build their ATM networks, they then sold access to them to third-party companies, ripped (most) of their bank-branded ATMs out of service and now we're stuck with having to pay to get our money. These email fees are just the same kind of approach. I can just hear it now... "If you want our system to talk to their system, you'll have to pay to get your message through." "If you want your email to get through our... AHEM... I mean THEIR spam filters, you'll have to pay to get your message through." "Convenience costs you know, we have hefty CEO salaries... AHEM... I mean infrastructure maintenance and other overhead costs to pay." You can start drafting the blank check now people.
I looks like it is time to loby congress for a law that creates an opt-out e-mail list similar to the opt out phone number list. I don't want spam regardless of weather or not the complany payed to send it to me.
The Pay-for Uber-Filter....
Then will come the increasing pay scale filter. In otherwords, who ever has the higher fee plan (sender/receiver) will win on whether the email goes through or not.
Ok people... the only organizations who would be willing to PAY for the right to bypass all of the spam filters are the advertisers... the ones who have an ad budget, the ones who want to get their products in front of your face without being blocked, and AOL and yahoo just found a way they can justify letting spam through, and get paid for it at the same time. This is nothing more than them trying to get paid to look the other way... kinda like you grease my palms and I'll pretend like I'm not watching when you heist the jewelry. They seriously MUST think they're dealing with a bunch of idiots... oh nevermind.. they are... AOL users are mostly a bunch of brain dead computer illiterate users who have to have someone hold their hand to find the internet, and yahoo... we'll their users arent much more than a bunch of horny guys who want the spam anyway, so now AOL and yahoo want you to think they are the hero's of the day by charging people to bypass their spam filters to stop spam... in reality all they are going to be doing is getting a kickback from the spam people to allow them to bypass their spam and get right into your inbox anyway. Ok... time for me to shut down my free yahoo email address, and AOL couldnt PAY me to use their service. Now lets just see how long it takes the other players to catch onto the money making sceme and jumping on the bandwagon. Then it'll be spam is bad, unless you're paying us to look the other way... then its just fine.
Exactly? Mark of Spam
There--that's better--haiku!
will be coming soon.
But, like the free credit reports which you are legally entitled to - for free - but that many firms "offer" to sign you up to a "credit report protection" scheme and then bill you $19.99 USD annually to get, many people will sign up to AOL and Yahoo "Do Not Spam" lists and pay for something that they will be entitled to get for free.
There's a sucker born every minute, and then there's hackable Diebold voting machines for the rest of us.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It sounds an awful lot like blackmail to me. (If you pay us will let your content through, otherwise you sleep with the fishes)
hey Aol & Yahoo,
you mind sending me an address list of all those who sign up for your service? i would really like their address.
No, seriously, send to me. I want their legitimate address(email & home), after all they have mine.
I wonder if the public ever got their hands on that charge-list it could then be turned to every non yahoo & aol ISP's blacklist. Heh.
Does this mean if AOL & Yahoo are charging these spammers to send emails through that they will send with a legitimate return address? Or are they just going with the classic "oh don't bother emailing us back, just visit this website" route?
I've read other comments, and I still can't figure out what they are thinking.
What they are doing, in fact, is to create a new class of messages. Paid spam. Companies may figure out that it's better for them to pay a handful thousand bucks for the assurance that they message will be delivered. But there are a number of problems with the entire idea, and I don't even know where to start.
Just to start, one problem. Anti spam filtering is not perfect, and false positives are a fact of life, that we accept because we know that filtering spam is hard. But, the very moment I start receiving "authorized" spam -- spam that I myself did not authorize, but that my ISP decided to forward to me because HE was being paid for it -- I'm probably going to ask, do I deserve indemnification for false positives?
But there's worse. Unsolicited messages are unsolicited messages, period. Paying the ISP to deliver such messages does not make them solicited or legitimate. There's also the risk that, by accepting to forward unsolicited messages in exchange for money, the ISPs may become liable under anti-spam laws. They may claim that they are only carriers, but I fear that the borders start to become fuzzy. In general, most people don't mind spam filtering and anti-virus scanning, because that's something done to OUR benefit, as customers. This is not the case with the "paid spam". I sincerely don't know if such ISPs would still be regarded as common carriers if they decide to discriminate messages this way. I may turn out to be a bad idea in the end.
Afterall, I never get spam mail in my snail mail where it costs like $.40 to send. All those ads and various other junkmail are my imagination.
Actually, it only costs them 4.5 cents to send you junk mail via the USPS. It costs non-profits about the same as well.
Only the peasants in Soviet America pay 39 cents to send letters. Businesses pay one-tenth the amount.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I bet yahoo and aol are really happy about this. Atlast they can pinch a share of that wonderful SPAM business they've been drooling over for so long.
In other news, you can now bypass the obligitary Preemptive Email Advertisment displayed every ten lines for a mere one cent per mail.
Hostes alienigieni me abduxerunt. Qui annus est?
Will AOL/Yahoo give me a cent for every email that I get from one of their users, if I "promise that the email will get through"?
All this is going to do is ensure that personal emails receive less priority than commercial emails. That's the opposite of what most people want. Anyone with an AOL or Yahoo address should probably get a GMail one, instead, now.
So, AOL and Yahoo get in the spammers industry?... let's make money - screw the customers... I guess they didn't calculate the customers that will turn away from them, leading to AOL's and Yahoo's bankruptcy... I won't miss them anyways
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Email is different in that the companies (and zombies) push content to your inbox.
Seriously the insult to /. users and an admission by this guy that he is a corporate IT rep demonstrates the problems we face with 'leaders' today.
....whats your point?
People good on paper (certification) but who cant wipe the corporate nose with sound decision is the root problem. Meanwhile, people like me who can read between the corporate lines of greed continue to be laid off.
Isnt it ridiculous that Microsoft can roll out antivirus product to protect the insecure Windows they produce? Isnt it stupid for telcos to charge the likes of google for use of networks? and is it logical for AOL and partners to charge spammers to access users?
Your post advocates a
( ) 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
(*) 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
(*) 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
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(*) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(*) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(*) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) 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
( ) 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:
( ) 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!
Only the peasants in Soviet America pay 39 cents to send letters. Businesses pay one-tenth the amount.
Are you uninformed or a troll? To get discouts on bulk-mailings business jump through a bunch of hoops like presorting, bundling, and barcoding their own mail. These mailings also aren't sent First Class. Essentially, the bulk mailers are saving USPS work, and USPS is rewarding them with an appropriately lower rate.
If you care to inform yourself
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
If banks, eBay, Paypal, and credit card companies were to all start using Goodmail certification, AOL and Yahoo could trash any uncertified mail claiming to come from them, which would make a big difference in phishing traffic - but they could do the same thing today with SPF or DKIM, and you'd think that Paypal would be more willing to adopt SPF or DKIM for free than to pay money to Goodmail.
But don't worry - spammers would *never* copy Goodmail's certification logo - that would be Trademark Violation!
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Are you uninformed or a troll? To get discouts on bulk-mailings business jump through a bunch of hoops like presorting, bundling, and barcoding their own mail. These mailings also aren't sent First Class. Essentially, the bulk mailers are saving USPS work, and USPS is rewarding them with an appropriately lower rate.
Neither. I made a statement of fact that spam (in terms of bulk mail) is at a cheaper rate even via the USPS - many people don't realize that they pay a much higher rate to send mail than a business or non-profit does.
The same will apply to the new pre-paid spam that Yahoo or AOL will permit - most likely they will require that it be properly formed headers, with valid email addresses (and only a certain level of rejection rates, or else bounce-back rejects may be automatically deleted or culled). Sure, this saves them money.
But it's still spam. Just official spam.
Slap a postage stamp on me and call me certified double registered mail to an FPO, but it's still spam.
Yum!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
AOL is betting that their paid subscribers will be happier if this works. Yahoo is betting that their free-beer subscribers will be happier if this works. If Goodmail allows too much spam to get through, AOL and Yahoo will lose customers to GMail and Hotmail and other free-beer mailbox providers, and maybe other paid providers, so they've got an incentive to make sure Goodmail doesn't support spam. At a quarter-cent per message, they'd need to allow 4000 messages to make up losing for a $10/month subscriber, and if I got 4000 spams in a month, I'd be long long gone. (Not from Yahoo - my free-beer accounts would sit there unused and happily accumulate spams...) But AOL supposedly gets only 25% of the revenue and Goodmail gets the rest - so AOL would need to allow 16000 paid spams/month, about 500/day. Not gonna happen.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Neither. I made a statement of fact that spam (in terms of bulk mail) is at a cheaper rate even via the USPS - many people don't realize that they pay a much higher rate to send mail than a business or non-profit does.
But your statement is (still) bullshit. Businesses do not pay less for the same service that you or I do, and the same service that they are buying is available to you, if you send out bulk mailings. It isn't true to say that "bulk mail is cheaper", or "companies pay less", since you are talking about a specific class and category of mail, and whether or not it is cheaper is debateable, since some of USPS's costs (sorting, etc.) are simply shifted to the mailer.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
No way!
I think whats really happening is that Yahoo and AOL are noticing that spam isn't going away, and in fact has a new bunch of trouters pushing the junk and they (the spammers) are making a ton of money out of it. Yahoo and AOL want a piece of their pie. The filters aren't generally working and they spammers continuously find ways around the filters. Big cat-n-mouse game. I think they stand to make some serious cash revenues out of this and it will help their corporate bottom lines more than it will effect the numbers of spam.
Keep those filters up on the client end boys and girls. It's the only way of evading this scourge of the planet!!
Cheers
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
With mail clients that do their own filtering (like Thunderbird), there's not a chance in hell of getting unsolicited bulk mail as much as the user who is stuck with crap webmail. However, it's why I always say, RUN YOUR OWN DAMN MAIL SERVER! It's what I do. And it's heaven compared to what everyone I know has to endure. And it's not all that hard...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Not only is this a dupe (with its own misleading headline), but the headline here is also misleading. AOL and Yahoo! have offered filter circumvention for years. They're just changing the model by which it's done.
There's room for plenty of interesting discussion about Goodmail, but somehow the headlines and summaries keep getting the details wrong...
How many providers are there in the world? Thousands? Now multiply this by the amount each of them wants for a license (I bet the order is a bulk order, for say at least 1000 mails, you can't pay fraction of the sent for just one mail).
You'll get something that is the cost of businesses that need to send legit mail notification to their customers, such as download information after purchase or tech support replies.
Because if the filters are becoming tighter, you'll just have to pay up or risk your legit e-mail be identified as spam. Damn you Yahoo and AOL.
well, there are these things called 'postage meters' you put a sealed envelope on a scale/printer combo, and press a button and you pay the postage for the EXACT weight. 39 cents is for a full OUNCE of non-presorted mail. meters are available to anyone, there are websites that sell the devices... and you can 'refil' their postage over the internet. (they can only print a metered amount if they have an account with sufficient funds to deduct from to print the postage mark) you can send the mail un-presorted, just like any other piece of mail, savings can be signifigant.
now, if they're mailing you a little post card presorting it, and in their pre sort facility they fill the mailbags up by 25 lbs sacks they pay by the pound of mail, at what comes out to a Very Discounted rate.
for post card sized mailings it could well turn out to cost 3.9 cents, or less.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Obviously there are problems with this. The exact prices set are probably going to be extremely low, but I think the more important point is that AOL/Yahoo gets to establish 'accounts' with senders.
...
These senders who pay for their privilege will do a few things:
- step up their spam filters
- monitor outgoing emails more
- respond to AOL SCOMPS with the quickness
Especially since accidentally letting a burst of 20,000 emails escape from your server/network might cost you muchos $$. Also, depending on how many 'accidents' have happened in the past, AOL/Yahoo might raise the price per email.
Sucks for some people, rocks for other people.
Now, I would think it a LOT MORE useful for AOL/Yahoo to use this as an 'incentive plan' to promote other anti-spam technologies such as 'DomainKeys' and SPF.
Those sending proper DomainKeys and/or SPF validated messages don't get charged, and their emails make it through the filters as well. They might even be noted as the driving force behind the widespread adaptation of those technologies.
my $0.02
To be blunt, if Yahoo and AOL go live with this, I expect that they will be added appropriately all available blackhole lists.
Welcome to to the dark side Padawan, arise!
There's a big difference between providing a service that has a lower risk of mail being accidentally lost, and deliberately losing them unless you pay the "protection money". The latter is definitely extortion. It's got nothing to do with stopping UBE, it's purely a profit centre.
Graham
Habeas guarantees that by bearing their mark, they're not spamming, when 9 out of 10 times they are anyway. As for the legitimacy of companies that say they don't spam, or buy, sell, or trade email addresses, why is it that the 'legitimate' bulk email senders have the balls to say that I signed up to be spammed by them from an IP address that I haven't had access to in 5 years?
It would be a shame if your e-mail were caught in our spam filters. A real shame indeed. Say, I could make sure it is delivered nice and safe. For a small fee, of course.
----- "I'm still sane on three planets and two moons."
The only reason you can send a first-class letter in this country for $0.39 is because advertisers send lots of spam mail. The carrier has to talk the route whether there is the one letter from your grandma or the one letter from your grandma and the 8 credit card offers, so letting people pay to send you credit card offers lets those fixed costs get spread around so you can have cheap mail.
This would do the same thing for email. YOU still get free email. You can still send your friends free email. People who you know are going to send you email can still send you free email. And, people who don't know you can pay money to send you email, which you can open, or not.
It's teh same thing when you open your mailbox: You probably pull out a bundle of envelopes, pull out your bills and letters from grandma, and in most cases throw out the junk mail. It's the price you pay to have an inexpensive mail system.
The other thing this does is change the nature of spam. You will get less spam about penis pills, because the people who certify the mail won't certify mail advertising penis pills. Why? Because it's fraud. It's much the same with the US mail: Why don't you get junk mail advertising penis pills? Cause it's a federal offense to commit fraud through the mail system. so if you get something in the mail, you do a least have some level of assurance that it's not fraudulent. (If's not impossible, but far less likely than with, say, email.)
Free email may have been reasonable when it was ARPAnet. Totally free email probably is not reasonable when it's everybody-on-the-planet. It would be nice if it were free, but as with everything else, most things worth having cost money.
paintball
Afterall, I never get spam mail in my snail mail where it costs like $.40 to send.
But you only get a few of them a day. (And it's more like $.04, as other posters have said). The problem with spam is that you get so damn much of it. A few per day is no big deal. It's the hundreds per day that some people get that make spam a problem.
And they still get to crap all over my inbox with their excrement.
i live in sbc prime dsl territory, so guess who my dsl provider is?
2^3 * 31 * 647
that if the client is sending more than x emails per hour/10 mins/3 seconds/two whale farts/whatever then they have to pay the fee? so if i am sending out ten emails in 1 day, then i probably am not a spammer. does this make sense? now the question is, what about legit mailing groups, ie unis/colleges (who have their own sendmail/etc server usually, but the receiving server could still reject it.
2^3 * 31 * 647
The key here is the feedback loop that people often ignore. As an ISP, every message AOL users mark as junk shows up in one of my mailboxes. You may this this is a bad thing, and yes I do find the occasional person who uses the junk button instead of the delete button (they are AOL users after all), however being a big ISP and on a lot of harvested lists, they're one of the first to get Spam. A compromise in a script, a stolen password, or just a user that needs a good whooping will make itself apparent pretty quickly and we handle and remove it, clear out messages and make sure it doesn't happen again by the same means. Yes mistakes happen, people love compromised formmail scripts for Spam, but we keep in that feedback loop and make sure that we find out about them ASAP. This is of course rare for us in particular.
So why this lovely comment? The feedback loop. Without it, we'd keep sending Spam. Possibly we wouldn't notice until a few weeks later when the queue starts looking a bit big on our various graphs and we go check it out to find that AOL has been rejecting our SMTP conversations. So suddenly, as opposed to sending Spam and continuing to try for a week, we have to neutralized in 10 minutes.
If sightings aren't fed back, RBL databases can't update. SpamAssassin can't learn your mail types. Bonded Sender can't fine senders.
The balance for these agencies that you report to is protecting privacy, while still providing enough data to the sender to make sure you don't get more mail... though more often the Spam that cares to take you off is the one who you'll recognize and remove yourself from anyway.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Nothing is perfect, and I never said Bonded Sender was anything close to it. However the concept is the same. We're talking about backing recipients with dollars in order to put a financial burden on those for their e-mail. The reason why Spam is so common is because it's dirty cheap to send. If you suddenly add a cost to sending it, it's less worthwhile and more difficult to manage. You need to link it wiht a credit card number or business name.
Keeping in mind, buying lists is not always a bad thing. Ever used a credit card? Airmiles card? Donated to a charity? Signed up for an in-store loyalty card? Your address and phone number is on many lists being sold and traded by countless organizations.
ALT.com buying a list isn't bad. It may be frowned upon in the e-mail world to not use opt-in or double-opt-in, but that doesn't necessarily make them Spam right away. The question is, if you try and unsubscribe from their lists, do they honour it? Do you end up on other lists instead? What is their privacy policy?
Bebo.com is sending you mail because OTHER PEOPLE have entered your e-mail address. These are probably your friends. These services are known for logging into messenger and passport and obtaining your address book (by permission... though personally I think M$ needs to do a good blocking on their IP range). This is as much Spam as me saying to a caller "No- I don't need windows or doors, but my friend does. Why not give him a call.". Bebo.com, hi5 and others all honour your request to never ever ever receive e-mail from them again.
Google mail bounces is of course an error on their part, and got fixed.
People are so scared of unsubscribe links. Use your judgement people. If Microsoft sends you a newsletter, odds are, even if you didn't ask for it, you're on some list. I'm sure they'll honour your removal request. Most bigger names in the public will. Sending mail without a specific opt in is frowned upon, but that doesn't mean that one click can stop it all. Obviously don't unsubscribe from your m0r7gag3 or viagikra *sic* but when you get some real e-mail from real companies that you know at least have some sense of self-preservation to not keep sending you e-mail, then that's what to do.
PS: A good idea is to use qmail's extension addresses. username-MS@mydomain.com , username-NIGHTCLUB@mydomain.com , username-ALT@mydomain.com. All ways to be able to quickly block one person who has your e-mail (or filter) and know who's spreading your e-mail address.
Of course most spam these days seems to come from worms on people's computers that harvest address books, web pages, and e-mail archives for e-mail addresses and submit them.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Current resolution: Habitat can call AOL up, demonstrate that their list is clean and their content is legit, and clear the whole thing up. It's a pain to have to do it semiregularly, but thems the breaks.
Goodmail resolution: AOL now plans to outsource this resolution to Goodmail, who will only work with you if you pay them.
In my opinion, if this were genuinely just a service that legit bulk mailers could subscribe to - cool, but if AOL and Yahoo say (as at least AOL is) that this will become the ONLY way to get legitimate bulk email through...
"Nice Email ya got there. It'd be a shame if anything were to happen to it."
Yes, most bulk mailers are spam-sending scum. They deserve whatever they get. Many others are legit businesses. They can probably afford this extra charge, but it still feels a bit like racketeering. Many others are nonprofits serving the public good. For their sake at least, I would like to see a free/open source solution (e.g. Domain Keys).
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.