Slashdot Mirror
Opposition to AOL's 'Email Tax' Growing
An anonymous reader writes "The Register is reporting that opposition to AOL's proposed 'Email Tax' that would create a two tier email filtering system is growing.
DearAOL.com, representing such organisations as the EFF and Craigslist, has written an open letter to AOL asking them to reconsider. "
Who cares what AOL does anymore?
I'm sure that for most companies, the proportion of their customers who have aol.com email addresses is dropping each year. As long as this idea does not catch hold in the growing domains like hotmail and gmail then we can just laugh as AOL gets more and more desparate to find a new angle for growth. This is not that angle.
But this will take out a huge chunk of spammers. The reason spam is an effective business model is because it is so very cheap. A big spam campaign can reach a million people. If ISPs charged just 1 cent per email, that campaign goes from within epsilon of free to $10,000.
It won't completely eliminate spam, but it will knock-out the extremely low-response rate "c1a l1z" emails.
Isn't this just making senders pay postage costs? We don't object to that in the real world -- why the outrage now?
Cinnamon
Vericon is coming!
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
What this means is AOL can look for any large volume of nearly identical messages and move them straight to the spam bucket. That means not-for-profit mailing lists. Think the linux kernel mailing list, mysql-users and hundreds or thousands of other lists, large and small.
Sure, spam volume for AOL users will decrease dramatically, but at what cost?
There are lots of very effective anti-spam tools available, and other anti-spam strategies that don't cost anything such as SPF that make it easier to discard obviously forged messages. The trouble with these is folk don't make money off them.
If you want someone to proffit from the spam you receive, pay someone like Mesegelabs to filter your mail - they'll be happy to take your money. Just don't make the rest of us pay so we can use email.
Sorry to rain on the parade, but there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. I'm sorry that AOL's (and others) plans to impose email charges on bulk mailers is going to raise the costs of some respectable charities and other nonprofits. But, the last time I bothered to check, sending bulk mail via the postal service was not free. So why should sending bulk mail over the internet be any different?
We've all become spoiled with free email on the internet, but when you think about it, there's no more right to free email than there is to free postal service. And as we have all seen, free email is probably the primary culprit in the rise of spam and many of its associated ills. So it is likely that anything that imposes additional costs on spamming will have some reducing effect on the overall volume of email. No, it won't kill all spam, but it will likely be enough of a barrier to some portion of small time operators and n00b phishers. And the bulk mail that one does get will have a greater probability of being from a legitimate source.
Free email isn't likely to disappear anytime soon. It is still a good marketing tool for those that provide it and a gateway to their other premium services. But I hope that the days of being able to send thousands and thousands of emails at no cost are coming to an end.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
If AOL goes through with this, I'll just scrub all AOL email addresses from my mailing lists. If AOL subscribers complain, I'll tell them to complain to AOL, not me. I'll also tell them if they want back on the list(s), switch to a provider with a clue.