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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. "
"... representing such organisations as the EFF and Craigslist... "
...and Moveon.org and the Gun Owners of America, and Civic Action, and the Cancer Online Resources etc...
In total this coalition has more than 15 million people in it according to USA Today.
BTW, AOL just announced that it is going to be raising its general monthly fee as well. Either they will drop this e-mail tax crap or they will lose those idiots who are still subscribed to their "internet" service
We seldom regret saying too little but often regret saying too much.
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!
Not only that, but it will make providing legitimate mailing lists that happen to have a lot of AOL users on them impossible. I have enough problems with AOL's braindead mail server configurations as it is. Now they want me to also pay them for the privilege to deal with their incompetence??? (I run a small ~250 user mail list *FREE OF CHARGE* for my cycling team, many of whom are AOL users).
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.
I think I'd be happy if my ISP implemented this so-called "email tax", provided that it was applied directly to lowering my bill. I pay $50 a month - which is about average for cable broadband in the US (in my experience). Anything that lowers my cost is welcome. Plus, I have *never* used my ISP provided email address, so I'd never see a single piece of certified spam from this endeavor. I don't see a downside.
Now if my ISP were to use this money for purposes other than lowering my bill - or perhaps increasing my speeds - I'd be entirely against this idea.
-ds
Yahoo is already trying to make this tax explicit:
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
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
Think the linux kernel mailing list, mysql-users and hundreds or thousands of other lists, large and small.
:)
Yeah, im sure lots of people who uses AOL as their ISP subscribe to LKML and database lists....
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
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.
If AOL wants to make a mistake like this, why not just let them? Will it piss off their users when spam starts flowing again? Of course it will! People will leave, case dismissed. Why on earth would the EFF (or anyone else for that matter) want to stop AOL from losing customers?
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."
- Napoleon Bonaparte
AOL can do whatever it wants. Just ignore it.
."
The better response is to make it absolutely, brilliantly clear that your service doesn't support AOL.
Stick a "Doesn't support AOL" banner on your website, put up a link saying, "AOL's mailservers no longer support the advanced technology used by the rest of the industry. Please upgrade to MSN, Yahoo, Gmail, or any of the other, reliable free e-mail providers out there. If you have any questions or concerns please direct them to or
Better yet, some one like hotmail or gmail should hop on this train and start a "switch from AOL campaign." What better way to grab users then to scare them off using _valid_ scare tactics?
We don't do business with any AOL users (just checked). The only AOL e-mail I have to deal with is one of our co-worker's private accounts. If he can no longer receive company e-mails, I'll laugh at him.
Hell, even if you do have a billion AOL customers, subscribe to this service for the SHORT-TERM only. Send each and everyone of your customers a nastygram every 2 weeks indicating that you are dropping AOL support, because their "outdated e-mail technology is no longer compatible with the rest of the web." Most people using AOL have had it forever; it won't take much to convince them AOL is ancient. Advise them to switch to an "up and coming" service like Gmail, and they'll switch, at least for your business related e-mails.
A wide variety of companies used to do this with all kinds of services. Internet Explorer, Active X, even AOL and internet access (back when AOL offered nothing but proxys). The key is not where the blame actually lies (AOL's supposed fight with spam), but to instead portray AOL as a white elephant that is no longer keeping up with the times.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell