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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?
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.
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.
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 $!
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...
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
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! --
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!
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
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!
37 cents for a stamp, that doesn't stop spam from showing up in my snail mail box.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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