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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.
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 $!
He probably spends more than that in a day on hotdogs and beer!
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...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.
"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!
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
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
There--that's better--haiku!