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AOL Won't Budge on Email Tax
deman1985 writes "InformationWeek reports that AOL has no intentions to budge on its use of certified email. The company today released a statement apparently in response to the vast amounts of criticism over the past week from consumers and various organizations. From the article: 'We believe more choices, and more alternatives, for safety and e-mail authentication is a good thing for the Internet, not bad,' said an AOL spokesman. 'Everything that AOL has in place today free for e-mail senders remains -- and will only improve.' The programs critics aren't so optimistic, but that doesn't seem to be hampering the company's plans. In a quote that could only be labeled short and sweet, AOL announced, 'Implementation of this timely and necessary safety and security measure for our members takes place in the next 30 days. Mark it on your calendars.'"
You can sign it here: http://www.dearaol.com/. MoveOn.org (political action group) is renouncing this absurb proposal by AOL as well. So it's not just strictly tech companies that are opposed to this.
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
There was a time when the only access to the internet for most people was a paid dial-up service where everything was nice and controlled. AOL made a stinking lot of money during the golden age. I think they want to enforce a new revenue stream. Sure, right now the old services are still free, but what happens when the bugs are worked out of the new system? You certainly have to respect the "My server, my rules" attitude, but with all the free email clients and the improved spam filtering, I think that AOL will finally drive the rest of their user away.
You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means
If an AOL user has you in their whitelist, you bypass all spam filters. No fees, no forms to fill out, no feedback loop to maintain, nothing. So all these charities just need to tell their users to put them in their whitelist before signing up for mailing lists or whatever. Lots of sites do this already, because they are aware of spam filters.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Actually, you need to be very careful about that. I had a client attempt to cancel his AOL subscription and he honestly thought he had. But apparently the guy on the other end was able to trick him (anyone who has tried to cancel AOL knows what I'm talking about) into trying it for free for "just another month". The client thought the service would be cancelled at the end of that month. Of course it wasn't. He told his credit card company not to pay AOL and never heard anything after that. Then years later he went to join AOL again only to be told he owed them nearly a thousand dollars in unpaid bills and he would have to pay them before he could get service. You can imagine what he told them to do. But if they had reported that unpaid bill it could have gone on his credit history and he would have had a hard fight to prove he had cancelled his service.
In short, get it in writing or get a confirmation code when cancelling service or you have no proof that you don't owe for the service!
"No, is too much, let me sum up."
AOL has made a series of poor choices with their email program/system, for years on end. Some highlights:
- They only display the email address of the person sending you email. You have to open the email to find out the name of the sender! (Shouldn't this have been fixed 15 or so years ago when AOL first started letting outsiders send email to their members?)
- If an AOL user wants to include part of your email in their reply to you, they have to copy and paste it themselves, there is no notion of inserting quoted text as with every other email program on earth.
- They put the "Report Spam" button right next to the delete button, and from the user's perspective it does the same thing: email disappears when you click it, with no warning. But on the back-end, AOL counts these against the sender, even if the person did it by mistake (since it is right next to the Delete button, this is very common).
- And the best of them all: plaintext emails to AOL members do not have URLs hyperlinked! They have to copy and paste the URL into the web browser in AOL, or the sender has to format the plaintext as a link, using A HREF, even though everyone ELSE that receives the email in this fashion will see this tag surrounding the URL. If you want everyone to have a nice view of your email and be able to click on the links, you have to format it as HTML.
Now here is where this email tax comes in. Right now, if an AOL member clicks on a link in your HTML email to them, they will get a warning that links are disabled, unless you are in their address book, or you are in the AOL Enhanced Whitelist. You get on this whitelist by having a clean record of sending a lot of email to AOL members, and not being reported too often as "spam." I.e. you're a company sending a lot of legitimate email.
In this case, they click on your links and they just work. If you're not on the enhanced whitelist, and you're not in their address book, they have to click on a "enable links for this email" button for EVERY EMAIL.
Now AOL wants to replace this enhanced whitelist system with the email tax system run by GoodMail.
The problem here is not safety or spammers, it's:
1. AOL's spam detection sucks.
2. AOL's email program sucks.
If they fixed those two problems, there would be no need for an enhanced whitelist or goodmail!
As for their line, "We believe more choices, and more alternatives, for safety and e-mail authentication is a good thing for the Internet, not bad..." Let me ask them, "So why are you dropping the enhanced whitelist?" That's not more choices, that's dropping one in favor of another... another that will provide you with some much needed profit.
I'm sure their motives are pure.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Why is everyone reacting so negatively to this. It's the first step in what is fundmantelly a great idea to elimate spam. namely:
Step1: anything that is not whitelisted by the receiver, and otherwise does not bear a stamp is by definition SPAM.
step2: (Not implemented yet) a universal postage system not an AOL only postage system.
What makes this great is that it can be done very seemlessly and nails the problem. If someone is willing to send you something unsolicited and pay for it then it may turn out to be junk mail but it's not a spam flood since they do have to pay for it. Right now I get junk mail in my snailMail box every day. It's annoying but it's not a flood. Occasionally I do get something interesting (e.g a better deal on DSL, an event in town, a sale at the hardware store, a buck off starbucks). But it's NOT a FLOOD. just imagine if mailing Junk mail cost nothing and printing it cost nothing. Imagine the flood that might happen in snailMail.
So we need a stamp to damp the flood. It's not that we want to elminate unsolicited e-mail. We just need to make it cost the sender a small amount.
The awkward thing about AOL is they have not done step 2.
People are tarring this iniative as though it were AOL trying to profit off of preferred spammer. That could be the case, depending on how high the fee is and who pockets it (why not let the spam recipient pocket it---open this e-mail and you could win an ipod).
But it's win-win. We need the fee to damp spam. and to the extent that AOL makes more money then it's likely they will also lower their costs of access to consumers. Or maybe they won't. Consumers might even pay extra to live in the land on minimal spam.
Move on is painting this as sinister. It's not. Moreover, this policy might needs some tweaks. for example suppose that politcal e-mail got a free pass and commercial e-mail had to pay. I'm not spammed by political e-mail yet since it would backfire.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Thats just not true. The status quo of having to jump through hoops to get on their 'white list' has been discontinued and will be replaced with this certified sendor bullshit. I run a web site and AOL is the main provider that causes us problems. We've been put on the whitelist, but occasionally some threshold of people click the 'this is spam' button instead of the delete button. My site started as a mailing list in 1996. Last year, I terminated the mailing list because of problems with AOL users. (We still provide a local NNTP newsgroup and syncronized webforum). The list was high volume, about 200-400 messages per day. We still need to send AOL users messages when people signup (free) for our site. Or when people forget their passwords. Or when people send us questions, etc.
Even trying to contact AOL to figure out what is going on is a pain. I've had our mailserver blocked before and gone through the process of trying to get it fixed, only to have my 'support ticket' closed because I'm already on the whitelist. If I'm on the whitelist, why did I get blocked?
I've implemented SPF (despite the fact that I don't like it) which hopefully will allow my mail to go through using the 'dynamic list'. However, last time I tried to signup for the dynamic white list, I was rejected because they said I was already on the list.
Not to mention that I need special code in the PHP software because AOL renders hyperlinks different so AOL users need the 'Click here to activate your account' link specially crafted.
The only other problem ISP is earthlink and their challenge email system. That just doesn't work with an automated site. When users signup, I send an email to the address they provide to confirm the email address (avoid typos, bogus email, etc) and even though I give them advance warning to add our sending email address to their whitelist or address book, 99% of the time people don't do that or probably dont even understand what that means.