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

How does this prevent spam?

[Mrs. Grundy]

I'm at a loss to understand how this will reduce spam. If I understand TFA they will essentially be allowing certain companies a pass through the spam filter in exchange for money. While I can see how this is useful in a situation like AOL or Yahoo! mail where the end user has little control over the spam filterparameters and is having trouble getting wanted e-mail from their bank or other business, I don't understand why they think spam producers will stop finding ways to circumvent the filter--it still seems like business asusual for spammers. I have my spam filter set up to let certain mail through automatically, but I canguarantee that this has not reduced the amount of spam hitting the filter. It sounds like they stand to make a decent amount of money from this and would rather make is sound like it's an anti-spam measure when really it is closer to advertising.

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.

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.

Re:How does this prevent spam?

[Enigma_Man]

At least it will make filtering out spam easier, just filter out anything with the "seal of approval".

-Jesse

A slippery slope to a full-blown racket?

[tiltowait]

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?

Re:A slippery slope to a full-blown racket?

[deblau]

Let's find out:

-----

Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

most reliable spam filter ever:

[wpegden]

trash "certified" email.

Fighting spam vs. being paid off

[MyNymWasTaken]

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.

translation

[ummit]

The fees are the latest attempts by the companies to weed out unsolicited ads, commonly called spam

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.

Da' Mafia!

[DoofusOfDeath]

Say, dat's a nice email message you got there. It would be a shame if some spam filter caught it. ;)

Next

[3CRanch]

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 $!

Yeah, like 1/4cent is a lot to a Nigerian Prince!

[The_REAL_DZA]

He probably spends more than that in a day on hotdogs and beer!

The Latest Greatest Spyware

[danielDamage]

...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.

Re:And who would pay this?

[Thud457]

I can't forsee any problems with this half-baked moneygrubbing scheme.

"But AOL certified that that email from the widow of the Nigerian President was real! Now all my financial base are belong to them. :-( "

If we charge them to send you spam

[WillAffleckUW]

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.

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

Smart companies do not get blocked.

[khasim]

In the UBE industry, spam is viewed differently than it is here on slashdot.

Yep. They love it, we hate it.

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.

Yep. Those are also included in the "spam" usage for me.

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 ... there's no benefit for the legit companies.

What this fee does is it allows companies that follow optout and other rules to get inbox delivery for a fee.

And those companies are already the ones least likely to be blocked.

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.

AGAIN, the legit companies do NOT do that ALREADY.

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.

Nope. Because the company/person most likely to send out those crappy ads will still send them and just try to get around the filters.

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.