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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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!