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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.
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.
Thanks, I hadn't hear of spam before. These kids have such groovy slang today!
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.
He probably spends more than that in a day on hotdogs and beer!
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
...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.
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
Their drones are oblivious to normal conversation... you have to plant some bait.
ohprettyplease@ireallylovespam.com
givemespam@ohyesidoreallylovespam.com
spamgoeshere@yahoo.com
yesindeedgimmespamtoo@aol.com
There, now they'll hear him...oh... damn thats bad.
"But AOL certified that that email from the widow of the Nigerian President was real! Now all my financial base are belong to them. :-( "
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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!
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.
37 cents for a stamp, that doesn't stop spam from showing up in my snail mail box.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
There--that's better--haiku!
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! --
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.
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
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.
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