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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.'"
'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.'
That's a pretty large swath of my calender... someone got another highlighter? Mine wore out around March 14th.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
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
Since I don't have a single family member, friend or business contact with an AOL address--and can't remember the last time I did, must be at least five years ago--I really couldn't care less.
this might seem a little aloof...but why do we, as Slashdot, care if people who mass-mail AOL users are going to be charged a really, really idiotic e-mail tax? AOL has never been known for cutting-edge technology and innovation (unless you want to count free CDs being used as frisbees/mirrors/coasters). Let the AOL spammers pay more to spam their gullible victims...I'm sure no one who reads /. uses AOL, and fewer probably care...
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
Just the sort of carry on regardless my experience with AOL product managers leads me to expect.
What do you expect from a company that can't figure out how else to make money besides raising dialup costs?
You know how most places with rebates and such won't accept a PO box as a valid email address?
I'd be sorely tempted to say "no aol.com addresses" when people sign up for stuff. Just put a note on the signup page that says "due to AOL's policies, we can't guarantee that you will receive the email that we send to you, therefore an AOL.COM email address is not a reliable means of communication.
>> "Mark it on your calendars."
Wow. That a classic example of manager-spreak. Lord, help them, they're being managed. You can bet the farm on that.
I know it's just a headline, but "tax" is putting this much too strongly. Taxes are levied by governments. Governments have a monopoly on the "legitimate" use of force--thus, if you don't pay your tax, the government has the authority to knock you upside the head, confiscate your property, put you in jail, etc. AOL will have no such authority to collect this fee. Mass mailers will be perfectly free not to pay the fee, and to encourage AOL users to dump that awful walled gate of an "online service." This is no tax.
Penny - plain text accounting
FTA: "Certified Email prevents and blocks spammers from sending e-mails to online users," said the AOL spokesman. Goodmail's program is 100-percent opt-in;
So in other words, Opt-ing and pay, or your email will be blocked. Spam kings willing to chip in would appear to be uneffected. Average joe mailing lists, kiss it good bye. Which beggs the question, why does anyone use AOL anymore?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Anyone who pays AOL to send me a certified email has just got to be someone I don't want to talk to.
They're trying to make a buck. Are you surprised? We are well our on way to paying for email. First comes the "premium" packages. You know, if you want a virus and spam free inbox with the ability to send mass mails. Later you have to pay for intermediate mail as well - if you send over a certain amount. The last step is to announce that because of the many security threats due to viruses and becuase of spam abuse and the high volume of email, EVERYONE will have to pay. It's an enterprise. It will start with the big companies, and once they force it on the market, the smaller companies will follow.
Isn't it funny how businesses think were stupid enough to believe statements like the following:
>>> Implementation of this timely and necessary safety and security measure for our members
Of course their motiviation is all about concern for the end-user. The fact that they will make money on every fricking email has no bearing on their decision to implement this.
"In a quote that could only be labeled short and sweet"
"GO FUCK YOURSELF AOL" is also short and to the point, but far from sweet.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
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
I have already started adding it to signup forms on my site (forums that require email activation for example). There is no way I'm paying to send emails to new users.
Of course, this could end up with AOL users having to PAY for signups on things like email lists and other subscriptions, that would otherwise be free.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
I for one will be blocking all @aol.com addresses from my email servers until AOL agrees to pay me 10 per email.
What goes around, comes around. As I previously suggested, internet extortionists risk everything...
How many fools will remain with AOL when other ISPs start blocking their email?
Of course MoveOn opposes it. MoveOn is exactly the sort of organization who gets hit by this. They send out large quantities of email, presumably to people who have signed up for it. If they send out a work-daily email to 100,000 AOL customers, at a $.001 non-profit rate (I'm making these numbers up, but they're on the rough order of magnitude) that's $100 a day, perhaps $20,000 a year. That's real money to a nonprofit, even if it's half the cost of a single stamp per person for an entire year.
The question would be whether AOL plays nicely. If they have a non-profit rate, does that mean that they WILL absolutely demand their inch of green? Or will they note that MoveOn plays by the spam rules and not block their emails? Will AOL extort that $20k a year even if MoveOn obviously isn't spamming?
I'm a little ticked that MoveOn is trying to pretend that they're fighting for the general freedom of Internet, lest AOL start extorting your grandmother to send baby pictures. In reality they're just interested in themselves. Rightly so, perhaps, but the cloak of hysteria bugs me.
"Balderdash and piffle," replies Jennings. "Nothing's really changed."
First: piffle means balderdash, doesn't it? What a bunch of tomfoolery and flimflam.
Second: sorry Jennings, something has changed. The FTC's CAN-SPAM law, debated though they may be, allow that unsolicited e-mail can be sent LEGITIMATELY under certain strict guidelines. AOL's e-mail "tax" will potentially damage the ability of legitimate law-abiding businesses to legally market their products.
Third: what is AOL's definition of spam? What does this mean for nonprofits who legitimately send mass e-mails? What about politicians who spam -- will AOL let that through, or not?
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
You want to send me spam email, pay me.
Also, EVERYONE complaining about this is a spammer. They don't think they are spammers, but they are. If the recepients want you on their email, they will put you in their address book and you won't be charged a thing.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
And in other news AOL announced a new subscription service for it's members, for an additional $5.95 a month members can enable the AOL goodmail filter service on their mailboxes which will block out all emails from senders that have signed up for AOLs "certified sender" list. :)
I really hope, AOL will charge those non-profit organisations the same as other businesses. Why should televangelists, corrupt political parties or other assorted whiny do-gooder have it easier to get to me? If a company tries to sell used condoms or recycled viagra, at least it tries to be productive.
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.
What bugs me about the email tax, and I'm sorry to fall back on a cliche debate term, there's some definite slippery slope potential. For now those who pay bypass the filter. A lot of spam still gets through these filters, however, so the next obvious step is to add more rules to the filters. Pretty soon, as you proposed, the only way to send email is to pay your 0.1 cent, but since spam filters are generally pretty good about filtering out bot spam, paying to pass the filters actually could increase their success rate at getting into people's inboxes to the point where it's worth paying that tiny fee. More so for hand-crafted spam, which obviously accumulates slower.
And I'd wager there would be no cost savings from your ISP. The extra layer of billing penny fractions to billions of email accounts, even handled as a tree structure (consumer 1 > mail provider 1 > mail provider 2; consumer 2 > mail provider 2 > mail provider 1...back and forth ad infinitum), would eat up all the revenue.
No, it's not sinister, but it's misguided. I'm counting on the consumers to weed this one out. AOL has further decreased the likelihood of me every subscribing to their services with this move.
I'm sorry, I was under the assumption that AOL was an authority, and that they were imposing a charge of money to access their otherwise public service.
Of course, the 1b definition fits even without me being facetious.
Now, I'll thank you for hijacking a +5: Funny thread just because it's the first post to the article, simply because you're afraid that if it's any deeper into the comment tree no one will see it, or care about it.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
Here's the thing... for most people that this will actually impact, it will simply make it harder for AOL users to use whatever your service is.
AND THAT'S THE GOAL.
AOL has fallen on hard times recently. The "walled garden" isn't holding the users in like it used to. AOL users have come to consider that AOL = the internet, for the most part, and lots of them are using AOL as a more normal, but particularly expensive and annoying, ISP.
But that's not retaining existing customers. Once an AOL user finds out that signing up with a more traditional ISP is not only cheaper, but actually provides a far better service, then they tend to switch. AOL subscriber numbers have been dropping for ages now.
AOL wants to stop, or at least slow, that. And that's why they are going to this service. By degrading the rest of the internet to their users, they hope to make their walled garden seem better by comparison. If AOLers have problems with the internet services delivering email to them, then they will tend to blame the service itself, not AOL.
People complaining that this will make things harder for them are missing the point. It's supposed to make things harder for you. Hard enough to make you give up on supporting AOL users. This gives AOLers a bad impression of the rest of the network and keeps them in their walled garden.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.