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."

Comments

And the seal will look like...

[Tackhead]

> 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?)

Re:How does this prevent spam?

[MikeFM]

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.

slashdot morons

[Russ Nelson]

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

Filter tightening measure

[Russ Nelson]

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