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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."
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?)
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.
Maybe they should do it auction style like Google with the profits split between the users and the companies. Let the advertisers set the most they're willing to spend per message and users set the least they're willing to make per spam message they get.
I'd maybe go for that. Anyone willing to give me $1 a message to read their ad I'll be willing to see what they have to say.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
In the UBE industry, spam is viewed differently than it is here on slashdot. Whereas we consider Spam any unsolicited ad, spam is considered email that does not follow the rules of CANSPAM in the industry -- that is it doesn't allow opt-outs, emails come from scrapes, etc. What this fee does is it allows companies that follow optout and other rules to get inbox delivery for a fee. Further, because the cost goes from about $0.00001 per message to around $0.0025-$0.01 per message for that delivery, the marketer has incentive to target his list more carefully rather than just blasting everybody in sight. Because of this, he will send less email. Ex: Sending 1000000 emails right now costs next to nothing. At $0.01 per message, that same campaign costs $10,000 rather than $100.00.
This also gets rid of some of the crappier ads, as the marketer is going to pass the $10,000 fee on to the advertiser. Suddenly, not just anybody can drop $500 for an ad targeted at a few million people.
We would. We do market research. We don't spam or harass people, but we get plenty of dumb users who can't figure out how to click on the "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of every email, and instead complain to their ISP. It only takes 2-3 of those per ISP before we're blacklisted, and we have to go rounds with their IT department to prove we're legit and non-spammers.
We already pay a company for something similar to what AOL & Yahoo are going to do... http://www.habeas.com/. Now, we don't pay per-email, but we do pay per server, and quite a bit.
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.
You'd probably want to, at random intervals, ask for the user to fill in a captcha or something similar to that. Maybe more often for higher paying messages.
It'd be nice to flip the spam problem on it's ear though where it was the spammer that had to be careful of who they were spamming. Let them be careful and send out messages to smaller more targeted groups.
Google, with GMail's collection of information about the owners of the accounts would be good at targeting those messages.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
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 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
They almost tricked me with PayPal "request to update account information" - still bothering me from my first (and only) paypal transaction..
good thing i'm using gmail - it detects faked sender emails, and labels it as spam
actually, gmail is doing alot more to protect me from these phishers than paypal itself - the only response i get from paypal when submiting phishing report is automated reply message.
it allows AOL & Yahoo to crank up the sensitivity of the spam filters
Bingo! That is the extortion scheme in a nutshell. Dial up the sensitivity of the spam filter to create a need for the new service. Keep dialing it up very slowly until you reach a critical mass of paying customers. Then, drop the hammer on the rest. Nothing gets through unless you pay.
The end result might be slightly better than what it is now, although I doubt I'll notice. Another thing I'll hardly notice is those companies passing along the cost to us by increasing the price of their services, but it'll be there.
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
Legitimate spam? And how is that better than fake spam?
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
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'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.
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.