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Pay-per-email and the "Market Myth"
AOL created quite a stir in February when they announced that senders would soon be able to bypass the company's junk mail filters by paying a quarter-penny per message to a company called Goodmail, which would split the revenue with AOL. EFF and MoveOn.org argued, in an open letter posted at DearAOL.com and co-signed by many groups including Peacefire, that once the big players were able to bypass AOL's mail filters for a fee, there would be less pressure on AOL to fix problems with non-paying senders being blocked, and that the quarter-penny would become a de facto "e-mail tax" for newsletter publishers if other ISPs followed suit.
At the N-TEN conference last Thursday in Seattle, I had the chance to talk to Charles Stiles, the AOL postmaster, and Richard Gingras, the CEO of Goodmail, after a panel discussion about Goodmail's system, where they clarified some issues. First, if you pay for a GoodMail stamp, your mail not only bypasses AOL's junk mail filters, it also gets displayed to the user with a blue ribbon indicating "This mail has been certified" -- which is a promise to the user that GoodMail has actually done a "background check" on the organization and found them to be a "good actor". (So it's mainly useful for banks, as a way of saying "This is not a phishing attack", and for charities, as a way of saying "We are a legitimate charity".) Stiles said that AOL will continue offering a free whitelisting program for people to bypass the filters, where anyone can apply to join the whitelist (even though this can be easily abused by spammers as well, but AOL offers it anyway because most spammers don't bother). If you're on the whitelist, you don't get the little blue "Certified Email" ribbon, but you do get past the junk mail filters.
So, what's everyone so worried about, if anyone can bypass the filters for free? Well, one problem is that this is where Hotmail used to be, before they started requiring senders to pay a fee to bypass their filters. At one time, if your newsletter was being wrongly blocked by Hotmail, you could fill out a questionnaire with some verification information, and they would add you to the whitelist, which is what we once did to get the Peacefire newsletter un-blocked. However, once Hotmail started using Bonded Sender, a third-party company that requires you to post a $2,000 bond in order to get on their whitelist, Hotmail revoked the free whitelistings that had been given out in the past. If your newsletter is being blocked by Hotmail's filters, no matter how many people vouch for you as a non-spammer, the only way to make sure you get past the filters is to pay the $2,000 to Bonded Sender. (I refused to pay the fee, and of the last seven messages that I sent to our press list, all of them got labeled by Hotmail as "Junk Mail".)
Charles from AOL seemed sincere in saying that AOL's free whitelisting won't go away. But he can't promise or guarantee anything, and someday it'll be someone else's decision. And other ISPs, most of which do not have free whitelists, will be tempted to use GoodMail as a de facto whitelist, such that senders that don't pay will have a greater chance of being blocked.
But I think there's a bigger problem underlying all of this. It's not about specific problems with GoodMail's or AOL's or Hotmail's system. The problem is that many advocates of these systems say that any flaws will get sorted out automatically by "the market" -- and in this case I think that is simply wrong. And in fact the people on Thursday's panel can't really believe it either, because one thing we all agreed on was that Bonded Sender sucks. But has the marketplace punished Hotmail for using it? Have people left in droves because non-Bonded-Sender e-mail gets blocked? No, because if they never see it getting blocked they don't know what happens. Free markets only solve problems that are actually visible to the user.
And this is why groups like EFF and Peacefire are rallying against pay-per-mail. We don't protest bad ideas. We protest bad ideas that could cause harm because by their nature, the marketplace will not kill them. Think about it: if AOL announced that they were going to start charging $100/month for dial-up, would we care? Would MoveOn send out e-mail warnings to its AOL subscribers? Would the EFF start a coalition against it? No, because users will abandon AOL over something like that, and the marketplace will kill it. But people don't abandon their provider over wrongly blocked e-mail if they don't even know it's happening. And thus pay-per-mail could become a de facto standard because it's invisible to customers.
If Microsoft released a new version of IE with huge ugly buttons that were hard to understand, would civic-minded groups and public advocates complain? No, because that problem will sort itself out through browser competition. It's when Microsoft releases features that have bad implications for user privacy and security, that civic groups and experts complain loudly -- because most people can't assess the privacy and security risks of using their browser, and so the marketplace alone won't solve that. (Microsoft knows this, of course, which is why they have sometimes released features that have bad implications for users' privacy and security, but they never made the buttons big and ugly.)
This is what I think people like Esther Dyson don't understand, when she wrote her editorial in the New York Times: Partly she wrote why she thought GoodMail was a great idea, but mainly she wrote that she didn't see why EFF and other groups were so upset, when if the idea turns out not to work, it will die in the market. "If they [AOL] don't do a good job of ensuring that customers get the mail they want, even from nonpaying senders, they will lose their customers." But that's simply not true. Hotmail subjects anyone to random blocking who doesn't pay the $2,000 Bonded Sender fee, and there's no evidence that it has caused them to lose customers.
Private companies do not have the absolute right to do whatever they want with your mail. If you sign up to receive mail from someone, and they send you an e-mail, then that e-mail is your property; if your ISP knows that the sender is almost certainly not a spammer, then they are violating the sender's and receiver's rights if they block the message. (Not First Amendment rights -- those only apply to government laws -- but rights based on contracts and implied warranties, since I think an e-mail address comes with an implied warranty that your contacts will be able to send you mail for free. So stop composing your -- yes, this means YOU -- stop composing your message saying that First Amendment rights don't apply to private companies.) EFF and other advocacy groups are working on anti-spam solutions that respect these rights, and you may agree or disagree with their proposals. But the point is that they should be commended for realizing that the marketplace will not preserve these rights "automatically".
After the N-TEN panel on Thursday, since I had sent a "communication" to Richard Gingras from Goodmail by asking him a question, I handed him a penny and reminded him that, per his agreement with AOL, he had to give half of it to them. I hope I never have to pay Goodmail anything again to get my message through, and I hope you never have to either.
Guess I'll stay with Road Runner.
Is that e-mail was really just a quick late night hack that eventually became extremely popular.
now we have to deal with the consequences.
look it up if you don't believe me.
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
Why are aol worrying about spam we are living in a 'spam free world' now Bill Gates promised sheesh another example of AOL jumping on the bandwagon with to little to late.
Seriously though I really object to the idea of any system that requires any form of pay to use for email, it opens up a very worrying reality of email tax, lets face the US government started charging for the phone system to pay for WW1 whats next email tax to pay for the war in Iraq.
GeekServ Unix Consulting Services (http://www.geekserv.com)
If you aren't getting emails that you aren't expecting, oh well, that's spam.
I disagree with the assertion that the market would not kill off this idea. If you aren't getting emails you expect (as has happened to me in the past) you will seek an alternative solution. If it's really important, there's this device called a telephone whereby you can actually speak with someone else in urgent situations.
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
From my experience working for an ISP, business is more likely to be affect ed for organisations that don't pay for Goodmail certificates. End users just see one thing - email you sent me doesn't get to my AOL account, but email that othercorp sends me does. They don't care about the technicalities of what systems AOL is using that are getting in the way, all they see is service works from x but not y. Large email providers like hotmail and AOL hold everyone else in the palms of their hands, either we play ball, or we lose business.
Was there a story here? My web filter might have deleted any story that might have been here.
Wow! The EFF and associates have managed to trump their past inanity.
The author complains that his organization is unwilling to pay $2000 to send bulk mail past Hotmail's filters, and then complains that it is a violation of the sender's and receiver's rights to block the resulting mail as junk mail, basing this on an implied contract with the receiver. That reaches new heights of disingenuousness.
First, it ignores the possibility of the recipient creating a new account somewhere else. If AOL gives people free whitelisting, and MSN doesn't -- and there's a solid market for that -- then recipients will add AOL accounts to which the whitelisted people and organizations can send. The market in recipient mailboxes is highly competitive because there's no reason for a recipient to only have one online identity.
Second, it claims an implicit contract which is not present. There is an explicit contract between account holder and account provider: that non-spam email as viewed by the account provider will be delivered. Those are the TOS for all free email providers, to which the user acceeded when he or she signed up for the service.
Third, there's no implicit contract whatsoever with the sender -- and it is the sender who's complaining here, not the recipient. Peacefire.org is free to collect donations for its two grand -- but it won't. OK, but that's a demand the sender has made, not a choice the email provider has sanctioned. In a word...tough. Form a coalition of organizations which will prestamp the mail, if that's an issue.
There are two dots that are not connected in this article: the little "blue ribbon" thing and the de facto tax. The author claims that the fee would become a de facto tax due to less pressure on AOL itself to fix problems.
The connection not made is that there is another reason it would become a de facto tax. I work for a nonprofit organization. If an AOL user knows that organizations and companies who have become certified get a blue ribbon, and we don't pay up, then the customer's question becomes this:
Why don't you have a blue ribbon, too?
That hurts us. And it's yet another reason this amounts to extortion.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
At least we know now that we'll be able to easily recognize junkmail that paid its way passed the filter--it'll have a "blue ribbon." Blue ribbon=certified junk mail.
I see several possibilities:
- Spammers copy and paste the blue ribbon into their spam templates in 1/100th of the time it took Goodmail to come up with and implement it.
- Spammers sign up for Goodmail to send some of their spam out, in quantities that will allow the cost to be worth it. The spam folder in your e-mail just became worthless.
- I refuse to use Goodmail, and my legitimate e-mails start ending up in Spam. I encourage users of services that do this to switch to "a better e-mail service with better filters", namely one that does not support Goodmail.
look it up if you don't believe me.
You insinuate that hardly any work at all went into the creation of email. This says otherwise.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Sorry, but this is ridicolous. If this is true than I'm happy that I'm living in a country that has a law that communcitation carriers are NOT allowed to NOT deliver communication.
Private companies do not have the absolute right to do whatever they want with your mail. If you sign up to receive mail from someone, and they send you an e-mail, then that e-mail is your property
I'm not sure that this is the case. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that, in the UK, "snail mail" immediately becomes property of the crown when you put it in a post box (and it used to be a serious criminal offense to tamper/steal it, since you were effectively tampering with / stealing crown property). However, when you send an email, I know of no such similar legal statute for email. My guess is that, although you'd like it to be different, the contents of your email become the "property" of the service provider as soon as you hit "send". If any lawyers out there want to correct me, I'm fine with that.
Lets compare email to real mail, using the USPS as an example. Imagine if postage was free and paper/printing was also free. Your mailbox would be exploding with junk mail. (Some days mine does anyway, even with costs of postage and paper and printing) This fictional scenario, I think closely (but not perfectly) mirrors the current email system. The whole spam problem should have been forseen.
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
Over the years, I became bored with Yahoo since they could not offer their Launchcast service on anything other than Internet Explorer and Windows. I dumped them in and now GMAIL is the answer.
The point is, there are many providers willing to provide email sevices for "free". If a provider "fools arround", folks (myself at the forefront), are very much willing to jump ship!
"Hotmail subjects anyone to random blocking who doesn't pay the $2,000 Bonded Sender fee"
Do they actually block the email, or do they just send it to your junk mail folder? I am on numerous email lists, and I find it hard to believe that any of them would have coughed up the $2k to avoid getting blocked. Those emails all go to my junk mail folder by default (I have my in box set up with a white list), which is right where I want them to go. They sit in there for 7 days for my review and get deleted on their own, no need for me to hold tri-mag build questions or Microsoft news letters for more then a one time read. So if the "blocking" is just getting sent to the junk mail folder, I say who cares.
On the other hand, allowing a company to stick their emails in my in box against my wishes (like some MS and Hotmail newsletters) really annoys me. It bothers me in the same way a two tier internet bothers me. It takes away the level playing field and turns the system itself into a capitalist entity.
But I do like the idea of a certified white list and verified emails. Anything to cut down on the number of phishing emails and exploitation of the uneducated computer using masses.
-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
If someone gets your email address, you will be spammed. Gmail's spam filters work very well and so does Yahoo. So far, spam filtering is the only working solution I have ever seen.
Massive spammers should be punished, but the problem is that once they are gone, another spammer moves in to take their place. People should know better about responding to spam mail, phishing attacks and the like...but unfortunately, there will always be people who don't.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
...that's what a lot of these new age libertarians don't understand. Like was stated above, the market can't solve problems the consumer doesn't know exist. If the problem isn't addressed in the media or apparent to the end user, the customer stays with the company. The market can't solve things like this, sweatshops, the commercial exploitation of all available land, and the list goes on. It's an important point to understand that there is a public interest in regulating some "market activity."
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
Will I still be able to mark certified mail as spam?
Just because some company has paid to send me mail does not mean I requested it.
It would be quite nice to see little blue ribbons in a spam folder.
liqbase
"If you sign up to receive mail from someone, and they send you an e-mail, then that e-mail is your property"
Has this person read Yahoo's Terms of Service agreement?
As I've written before, the only way this spam stuff will be sorted out is when they redesign the SMTP protocol. All the legislation and 'pay-per-email' stuff won't solve anything. What e-mail requires is authentication in the protocol combined with black/whitelisting.
They should have the domain registrars hand out domain certificates with which e-mail communication has to be signed. In which case domain spoofing will be impossible and you could create domain block lists that work.
What they should really do to eradicate spam is give tax breaks for receiving junk email. That way we would be paid to receive government endorsed messages! In AOL Russia, email taxes you!
To show the spammer really does want your business. Really though, will those that use AOL really know what the blue ribbin stands for. My relatives that use AOL are usually lucky if they can figure out how to get thier e-mail and/or open atttchments and the like. If AOL does this, I will just make it a point to move as many of them, and anyone else I know, to an ISP who doesn't charge or block e-mail.
..whether the email I receive is solicited or not: me.
I refuse to use a provider that accepts money to whitelist messages that I may well consider unsolicited.
Spam => unsolicited commercial email.
AOL receiving some money does not make an email solicited.
The same Bennett Haselton of peacefire.org? The same Bennett Haselton with which I've exchanged email after email trying to get him to understand that, while it is his right to provide proxies to get around web filters, it was also my right to block what *I* want on *MY* connection? The very same Bennett Haselton who REMOVED me from the stupidcensorship mailing list (the one email account I was using anyway) so I would no longer receive notifications of new proxy web pages?
That Bennett Haselton?
Too bad for him that I'm signed up to that list with so many email addresses that he'd have to completely shut the list down to be 100% sure I'm not on it any longer.
If this is the same Bennett Haselton, well, I couldn't give two-shits less about *anything* he's got to say. As far as I'm concerned, he can kiss my shiny metal ass.
bork bork bork!
I just have my hotmail set up to block everything without a certain word in the subject line. Just pick something unusual that won't appear in spam (such as your initials. If you've never posted your middle name online, there ya go, instant "word"). Tell it to filter everything not containing that to the filtered mail.
Then, on your website if you have one, or tell your friends to have that in the subject line. I haven't seen a single spambot be able to read, understand, and follow the instructions I've listed on my webpage to include that word in the subject line. Problem solved.
For every mail service that blocks received mail that does not pay the extortion fee, customers of those services need to be made aware of what their provider is doing. The problem of users not knowing what is being blocked goes away when you tell them up-front that it's going to happen!
There should be well-known list of providers (like Hotmail) that use this practice. Then there should be a standard page that can be freely used by anyone who offers a mailing-list subscription. What this page does is examines the email address entered by the interested end-user. If it detects a domain on the list, then it forwards the user to a page which explains plainly and simply that their provider will block the mailings they are signing up for, that their provider is asking for money from what should be a free service, and that they should sign up with another provider if they want to receive your mailings.
Then, you might see more than a few people complaining and/or leaving their offending service over this issue.
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
I read somewhere there was a time when snail mail costs were born by the reciever. This meant that the cost of the snail mail had to be recovered by the deliverer. Often times the reciever refused to pay; causing often vain attempts to recover costs from the sender; leading to the change to where a person has to buy a stamp to pay upfront for snail mail.
Currently the costs are carried by the email reciever, but there is no indication as to what it costs the reciever and there is no charge back mechanism. This is one reason free market solutions will not work, no one knows his/her costs. The sender essentially gets a free ride.
In order to 'fix', at least somewhat, the spam problem the person sending the email must bear the cost. There would still be junk email, but the change would drive a lot of 'fly by night' operators out of the market, force legitimate operators to be more selective and to reduce the cost burden for the user.
I am not sure how it would all work. But the sender would have to deposit, say for example, $1,000,000 into an account to obtain 100,000 certificates. Then each email would have to be 'stamped' with a numbered cert. The recieving ISP could then submit the cert to the issuing 'bank' for reimbursement.
The cost to the ISP and user would be reduced. The sender would have to carefully budget and target the email for maximum effectiveness.
As part of their account, the user could recieve 'stamps' to send x number of personal emails. Much like cell phn minutes (would a cell phn paradigm work better?).
There are a host of technical and trust issues involved, including email from overseas. But until the sender is charged there will be no progress on spam (IMO).
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Make the thing actually authenticate the e-mail address of the sender. If you could make it so the sender e-mail was more than just a "fill in the blank" type of field like a name or anything else, it would be very easy to trace where this stuff comes from and get it to stop.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
If receiver gets the stamp money, two friends emailing back and forth net zero on cost. Add a whitelist for newsletters etc and it's all good. Seems to me AOL would do it this way, if they were interested in fixing email instead of just imposing a tax.
College room mate from 10 years ago finds you online and decides to say hi, City hall emails you a reminder to re-register your car, there are plenty of examples of unexpected emails that are legit and could be blocked. ....
From my own personal experience, I recieved unexpected email in 2002 from my father whom I had not heard from in almost 12 years.... I'm kinda a little happy that "the market" wasnt the arbitrating factor if I recieved that mail or not
... that it costs $.39 now to send a letter in the mail, but countless companies are willing to send thousands of pieces junk mail at a price MUCH steeper than a quarter of a penny. E-mail tax is a silly idea with nothing to offer.
(no text...) Murphy's law -- never seem to have mod points when you want them.
First, it ignores the possibility of the recipient creating a new account somewhere else.
Any AOL customer that does is essentially an extreme outlier.
Second, it claims an implicit contract which is not present.
That contract is present. Very, very, very much so.
It all goes back to what AOL actually is to the end customer. AOL isn't just their ISP. AOL, quite literally is the internet. For the vast majority of AOL's customers, there is no distinction between the concept of "The internet" and "AOL". To suggest that other ISPs exists, or that other email providers can be used, would be akin to suggesting a third dimension to residents of flatland.
AOL customers get an aol email account. To them, this is email, full stop. There is no other way to get email. What AOL does, is how email works. If AOL charge them $0.25 per email, they will pay and/or email less, as to their minds, there is no other way.
Now you could say; "Well AOL aren't to blame for their customer's being 'clueless lusers'!". But you see, that's where you'd be wrong.
AOL, as an ISP, as a company, has succeeded by promoting this false world view. It has become the number one ISP in America by actively and consciously perpetuating, both in the minds of existing and potential customers, that "AOL is the Internet".
It has engineering its software and systems to reinforce this idea into the heads of its customers, going so far as to provide an AOL browser for its customers to access both websites and email, and of course the AOL IM client. For the AOL user, the entire concept of any electronic communications over IP is inextricably linked to AOL.
And that's why this statement:
Third, there's no implicit contract whatsoever with the sender -- and it is the sender who's complaining here, not the recipient.
Is not entirely correct. When you send an email to an aol address, you know, ninty nine times out of one hundred, that the user on the other end is not just using AOL as an ISP. They are using AOL as a kind of internet care worker. They expect AOL to help them where they cannot help themselves, i.e. help them use email and browse the web.
It's rather like the relationship between a senile, invalid senior citizen and their health care workers. Their is a large element of essentially blind trust on the part of the AOL users towards AOL. They implicitly assume your emails will get through because AOL is "good", and will not even question if they do not arrive, and will also hesitate to complain if they suspect treachery for fear of being "cut off".
AOL have consciously and actively brought about this situation. The implicit relationship is real, and so too is the requirement that AOL act in good faith to their online invalids. Hence, the plan to tax email is a breach of good faith, and an clear example of AOL duplicitously taking advantage of people they have actively decieved.
May the Maths Be with you!
Saying that the market does not work because the consumer does not have perfect access to all information is akin to saying that democracy does not work because the voter does not have perfect access to all information. Furthermore, the fact that the voter does not have perfect access to information does not give anyone the right to abolish democracy. Likewise, the fact that the consumer does not have perfect access to information does not give anyone the right to abolish the market (or meddle with it, as may be the case). If you think the consumer (or voter) lacks information that they should have, write about it, contact the media, or take out an add in a news paper. (Competitors (/opposition parties) offering other products (/platforms) not suffering from the deficiency you are concerned with should already be doing this, but somethimes they make mistakes and it never hurts to help them out if you believe in the cause.)
As long as freedom of speech exists, meddling with the free market directly (through the use of coercive means) is not the optimal solution. Anyways, remember that the most important freedom (aside from freedom of speech) is the freedom to make mistakes (which applies to both consumers and voters).
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
This is a narrow view of the problem. It's not like most people are using their email to read bulk mail list messages. My mailbox on a given day is 99% spam, which I have to run through 2 filters, and then sort through manually after that to get to the meat. If I lose a couple of bulk mail lists in exchange for getting rid of even 90% of the spam in my mailbox, I'll be a happy person, and will take that solution over one that makes me lose time every day trying to filter my email.
Author: Andrew Pollack
Story Date: Feb 28, 2006 10:56 PM
Subject: Proof that "Sender Pays" will not stop spam even one little bit
Category: Geek Stuff
For those who don't know, the idea of "Sender Pays" is to make the cost of sending an email slightly higher than zero for bulk emails -- some say for everyone. Say a penny a message or less. AOL and YAHOO are talking about using this method for public bulk mailing lists. While neither is saying they'd charge users directly, the idea is that if bulk mail comes it without paying it would be treated with a higher degree of suspicion.
Along comes this article about reputed "spam king" Adam Vitale being busted by the Secret Service. Allegedly, Vitale charged an undercover agent $6,500 for equipment then sent spam out to as many as 1.5 million people in return for an agreed price of at least $40,000 off the top of the first revenue generated plus 50% of all proceeds. Do the math, at that price the going rate for sending the messages already well exceeds 2.5 cents per message -- plus the threat of jail time.
At a rate of 2.5 cents per message, sleazy sales pitches for porn, pills, and promises are still extremely profitable. The techniques of spam are so effective in fact, that now many of those products have "upscaled" and we're seeing the same products and scams advertised on radio, direct mail, and late night television. If THAT's true, its a hell of a lot more profitable than 5 cents, or even 25 cents per message is likely to stop. Unless you believe consumers are willing to voluntarily make email cost more than that, you can only conclude that "Sender Pays" is a nonstarter.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
If you're afraid that newsletters are going to be blocked by spam filters, then try using a different technology to send out newsletters. Why not RSS?
Oh, right, because THAT would involve hosting your OWN infrastructure and not leaching off someone else's. My bad.
Seriously, there are other ways to send out newletters now. The market may not kill the "pay-for-mass-mailing" but it may invent (or have already invented) OTHER solutions that solve the problem. RSS is the perfect way to provide newsletters without having to worry about being blocked as spam.
Get over yourself!
"Private companies do not have the absolute right to do whatever they want with your mail. If you sign up to receive mail from someone, and they send you an e-mail, then that e-mail is your property; if your ISP knows that the sender is almost certainly not a spammer, then they are violating the sender's and receiver's rights if they block the message"
If I sign up for an email from someone (or several someones) and it did not get through the filters for my email service, I will use another email service.
Let AOL tighten their filters all they want, it will simply drive people away from their service. The article's claims that people will not notice smack of the words of a spammer. If people are requesting an email, they will know when they are not getting it.
If they do not notice an email is not getting to them it means they were not expecting it in the fiorst place.
I guess I'm a luddite, but I have never been a fan of "managed email services". I don't want filtering, and I don't want to leave my messages on someone else's server.
All I want is a data pipe, please. Don't filter my content, just give me a pipe with as much speed as I can pay for.
I don't use email filters because I don't trust them to not block important content. When one email address starts to attract spam, I just delete it and create a new one. I put an auto-responder on the old account that says, "To my friends: this account has attracted too much spam - please contact me offline for my new email address". Within a month, everyone important has my new email. I do this ritual about once every six months.
If I didn't have to give out my email address for every damn thing on the web I could go a lot longer.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
HOW DOES THIS HELP YOUR CUSTOMERS?
The problem wasn't that your customers are receiving advertisements that weren't blessed by AOL -- it's that they were receiving too much junk mail -- PERIOD. Your clientele are already paying AOL their hard-earned money for connectivity, how does stuffing their $INBOX full of junk mail help them?
Wasn't this one of the things your customers originally whinged about a few years ago?
The good news is that the market will address this issue and correct itself.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Anyway, the primary lameness I see with the argument is that the spam filters no doubt are filtering out bulk email, that is, those with a truckload of cc: and/or bcc: addresses. If they simply sent out individual emails--which I would prefer as I scream bloody murder at people who stick my address in a visible CC: line with 987 of their closest friends--I'm betting it'd pass the filters, no problem. I just can't see how a true "newsletter" format could otherwise be reliably identified...unless it involved l33t$P34|<, V14GRA and pr0n.
The problem is that we can't afford to have transport providers selecting content if we have any expectation of maintaining open communications. As soon as transport providers are allowed to define the type of content, their self-interest, typically monetary but frequently political, overrides any other concern.
This isn't to say that content can't or shouldn't be 'regulated'. There are situations where this is clearly desireable, however, the providers themselves should not be allowed make those decisions.
Living in a time when communications is so widespread, not only amplifies it's effect, it also makes it's antagonists more desperate. Governments, corporations and numerous other groups have repeatedly demonstrated their intolerance of open communications. Combine this with the temptation to profit by creating classes of service within the transport system and you have an ugly mix.
Classes of service are a de facto process of discrimination. Build the features to support classes of service for profit, and their use for information suppression will not be far behind.
Do you really want AOL or News Corp deciding what contetn is fit for your consumption?
Mind you the original email had nothing commercial in it. It became so, and thus giving birth to spam because some of the companies offered it as a product. The only way out of spam would be creating a kind of VPN of SMTP servers, so that one accepts email only from an "authenticated" SMTP. It's wrongly to solve this problem in a commercial way, because it creates corruption, while the democratic way would be to solve it technically. Maybe an SMPT authority needs to be created, an subdivision of ICANN maybe.
... is paying for outcoming traffic rather than incoming.
And don't complain immediately. In real world, it is usually the sender of cargo who pays. And in real world, it works.
I run the email relays for a large financial institution. Spam is a bigger problem than they realize. If my users don't get an email, they let me know about it.
The example given that you might not get some important email that announces some security issue is bogus. If you are expecting to get your security announcements through *AOL*, you get what you deserve. AOL's service level agreement with its customers basically says that if we're unavailable, we won't charge you for that time, you have no other rights than that.
Email in general is not reliable enough for important stuff. Normal email filtering systems catch legitimate email all the time.
The market *will* sort this out. I don't know anyone who has a hotmail account, let alone considers it important.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Those in the latter group will therefore happily pay someone else to take that responsibility or just not bother (in which case they're an ideal target for spams, scams & viruses). It's therefore safe to assume that no-one in this group is listening to what Bennett Hasleton is saying because they either pay someone else to do that listening or just can't be bothered to listen.
However, those of us in the former group who do take responsibility for our own information go to great lengths to preserve our privacy.
Personally, I don't believe that it is possible to take 100% control when you rely on closed-source commercial products or OSes made by big, bad corporations who have no interest in you, just their bank balances. However, before anyone flames me for that comment, I recognise there are a lot of highly-skilled Windows sysadmins and IT personnel out there who do a very good job in securing personal and corporate data with the tools that they have available to them - I just don't accept that, with any closed-source software, you can never be 100% sure what that software is doing unless you analysing every single packet of data that software sends out onto the Internet.
Therefore, if you're in this group of people, you're either a very diligent closed-source user or an Open Source user who chooses very specific, trustworthy tools to store and distribute your personal information. In either case, you know what you are doing, are confident in what you are doing and therefore have no need to listen to any advice from the likes of Bennett Hasleton.
Quid pro quo - nobody is listening to Bennett Hasleton's advice so he might as well just shut the hell up.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I think the the paragraph about an email recipient not knowing they are suppose to get an email is hard for the general public to understand. How do you know what you don't know?
The second to last paragraph I think hits it on the head. If you can relate the email to a physical object that the recipient is entitled to, something that is already theirs. They are more likely to feel deprived and take notice. I'd like to see more discussions headed in this direction. I notice it gets a better responce from the other person.
Maybe you should read it.
I did. Where does it say anything about email being a quick hack? I assume you're referring to this bit:
First, nothing in this description tells me how long it took Tomlinson to come up with the idea and implement it. Second, Tomlinson's effort set up the addressing convention of email. That is hardly the whole of email as we know it today. As the article notes, SMTP didn't even come around until the early 1980s. My point is that it took a lot of work to create what we now know as email. Tomlinson built on SNDMSG, but that was neither the start nor the end of the process of developing email. To characterize its development as a "late night hack" seems insulting to all of the people who put their time and effort into that development.
Perhaps my interpretation of the original post was a bit oversensitive, but I just dislike such flippant characterizations, particularly when someone doesn't provide any factual information and suggests that I look up the information myself. If you know the history behind something, why not share it with the rest of us, instead of assuming we'll take your statement on faith?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The real issue is that you need to set up the parameters of the market to favor the behavior you want to see. There's no ideal platonic Market that is inherently the best and which will automatically occur.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Maybe I'm just paranoid, but it seems to me that certified email is the first step in legitimizing email marketing so that AOL and Yahoo can eventually tap into this revenue stream in a much bigger way. In fact, the pay-to-send fee revenue is tiny in comparison to what will be possible when AOL and Yahoo start providing insight into users' demographics and habits so that "certified" marketers can deliver high-value (i.e. high revenue) advertisements to mail boxes of the AOL and Yahoo customer base.
I wonder how much opposition we'd see to these "email stamp" systems if every message required a 1 cent stamp, recipients could whitelist anyone (which waived the stamp requirement) with a GUI in their own email client or in the sender's signup page, and the stamp proceeds were shared with the recipient?
Bulk email would be sent only to very high "welcome rate" recipients. And actual spam getting through would help pay its own cost. Why should AOL get all the profit off the spam it loads into your life?
--
make install -not war
Hi. My email is nelson_@_crynwr_._com. Remove the underscores to send me email.
If you do that, you have paid a price to send me email. Anybody have a problem with that? So why is it wrong when Goodmail customers pay AOL to send them email?
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Organizations, businesses and webmasters need to move on to something not controlled by these email providers. Placing your newsletters into RSS format and informing your readers/members that they need to subscribe to the news feed in order to receive the information would be the best route around the road blocks being put into place. Many applications, such as Thunderbird and Kontact support such feeds. Google even offers an online feed reader. (there are other sites that do too)
I work for a financial services company who has a clients who are supposed to receive emails from us related to trades. Since I manage our web presence, email deliverability is also my problem.
i l o rm.asp?id=isp
Here are the places to start:
Free Certification
AOL: http://postmaster.aol.com/whitelist/
Yahoo: http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/mail/cgi_bulkma
Verizon: http://www2.verizon.net/micro/whitelist/request_f
Reporting
Spamcop: http://www.spamcop.net/w3m?action=ispsignupform
Hotmail: http://postmaster.msn.com/snds/
Senderbase: http://www.senderbase.org/
Email Signing
SPF: http://www.openspf.org/
DomainKeys: http://domainkeys.sourceforge.net/
Paid Certification
Bonded Sender: http://www.bondedsender.com/
Habeas: http://www.habeas.com/
Goodmail: http://www.goodmailsystems.com/
A lot of providers outside the US have many of their own rules and regulations to follow, which makes it quite difficult to achieve deliverability. At the end of the day, we try to follow all the rules that have been laid out from existing companies and then deal with individual providers on a needs basis. The more users that use that ISP, the more we are willing to obey their individual rules.
Unfortunately, I see paid certification becoming the way of the future. If I can pay to guarantee to have my clients email delivered rather then negotiate with ISPs every other week based on their varying criteria, I'm pretty sure my company will pay for it. I don't like it, but results are the bottom line.
"The problem is that many advocates of these systems say that any flaws will get sorted out automatically by "the market" -- and in this case I think that is simply wrong. And in fact the people on Thursday's panel can't really believe it either, because one thing we all agreed on was that Bonded Sender sucks. But has the marketplace punished Hotmail for using it? Have people left in droves because non-Bonded-Sender e-mail gets blocked? No, because if they never see it getting blocked they don't know what happens. Free markets only solve problems that are actually visible to the user."
You just described the whole SMTP protocol, not just the Blue Ribbon Guaranteed Revenue gimmick. The crazy crazy free market has not saved us from SMTP either, although SMTP is indefensibly stupid and silently loses mail, people should abandon it wholesale, but they haven't so WE NEED PEACEFIRE! Bennett GET YOUR CAPE AND PHONE BOOTH immediately! Into the breech go ye!
I use email, and I use RSS. Each has its uses and drawbacks. As the GP pointed out, he WANTS to get security related emails. As a time critical notice, a push mechanism such as email makes more sense than a polling mechanism such as RSS.
What I would like to see (it might exist even, but not in the mainstream) is a distributed syndication protocol. Something like... Usenet mashed together with IRC. But with signed publishers, and the end-user running the equivalent of a news-server instead of a client, getting subscriptions through NNTP-style replication, but with a maximum allowable tree depth to minimize delay.
Just my random babbling for the day.
One thing this whole debate should be bringing up but isn't is that the whole newsletter via email mechanism used for so long is sadly out of date. With the various technologies available these days and the near always on access to the net most people have there is no reason to be receiving lengthy newsletters via the email system. They can easily be stored on a web page and pulled via RSS or simple pulled via an RSS news reader when someone *really* wants the newsletter.
Email was a great medium for this years ago, but come on, things have changed significantly in the past 10 years.
--- I do not moderate.
If all the mail servers were to bounce messages that they considered spam, then all the improperly classified (non-spam) mail would be returned to the sender and they would know it wasn't delivered. Sending it into a black hole creates a reliability problem.
The big problem with the whole concept of "pay" e-mail is figuring out who to pay. All the folks who carry the message are already being paid (by both the ISP and the consumer). Where should the money go? Maybe it should go to the receipient of the e-mail...
The Email Client Server architecture needs an additional improvement: client white-lists.
The client application should be able to store and share a list of approved and banned mail sources. The Server should apply the individual lists and forward appropriately.
I want to own my own white list. I do not give my ISP the right to decide who can send mail to me.
Once this level of service is built into the idea of the ISP owning the white list and charging for it goes poof!
I suspect that open source will implement this much quicker than proprietary companies.
This is really a question of choosing between 2 evils. There is no "perfect solution" because we don't live in a perfect world. There are only compromise solutions. so you have to ask which is worse spam or commercial whitelists?
I have to say that using yahoo e-mail I rarely get large ammounts of SPAM that makes it past their spam filter. And it has been a really Long time since something was mistakenly put in the SPAM folder.
Think Deeply.
Thanks for the offer but we really want to have our own child, additionally due to the fact I am not a US Citizen and my wife is there is some difficulties with us adopting (we fully investigated it). That said after I have my citizenship we have been planning on adopting a second child.
GeekServ Unix Consulting Services (http://www.geekserv.com)
Yahoo mail uses an interesting term: 'Bulk'. You see many mail providers using various terms- Junk, Spam, Bulk, etc. It's important to distinguish between these and handle them differently.
Bulk mail plain and simple is newsletters, monthly statements, etc. This is anything sent out en-mass. It can easily be detected by large ISPs by a burst of connections in a short piece of time, or similarly formatted e-mail in sequence. Bulk is subscribed- your bank statement, your annoucement list, your flyers, etc.
Junk mail is mail from real companies but that is clearly trying to sell you something you don't really need, but could need.
Spam is selling viagikra for just pennies to make your member bigg3r.
That's how I classify them, but it's interesting that some providers make the distinction, and tell users what they are filtering. Hotmail is probably wrong to filter 'Junk', as many non-junk e-mails go in there. I've had people sending FROM HOTMAIL to my hotmail, and it being marked as junk despite being a picture/file I requested and them being in my address book. Clearly Junk isn't the right word.
Telling a user that something is bulk is A-Okay with me- stating that this sender bursted a ton of e-mail to us. Marking as junk based on 'we've had a lot of complaints about this sender from other users'. And Spam being 'this is clearly a 20-30+ according to SpamAssassin, and isn't even worth delivering'.
Most users will never check their junk mail on hotmail. Many users won't get their bulk on yahoo. But at least FAIRLY tell people what might be in it, so they can choose where mail goes.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Perhaps you are over on hotmail. Over on gmail where I have my personal email account I get 5-10% junk email tops (i.e. gets past their filter) and I use my gmail address on usenet and at various commercial sites.
I also like that gmail has a "this is a phishing attack" button in addition to the "this is spam" button. Does any other freemail provider have a "phishing" feedback button? Does anyone know what actions google takes with the phishing emails? E.g. do they forward them to uce.ftc.gov?
... Pabst should be given the first one.
cndrr
Of course they find out about these things. There are people who check their spam folders and you might also not get a message you were expecting, like a confirmation for a purchase you make. If the quality of AOL's spam protection declines overall it's A BAD THING FOR AOL.
The author claims seems to think that Bonded Sender sucks because Hotmail's filters are no good. He never actually says anything going wrong with Bonded Sender, just Hotmail. Seems his analysis is misplaced.
The article's argument depends on one point:
"The market can't fix this because the problem is invisible to the user".
We have to understand that he means "invisible" as "not sufficiently inconvenient enough to be noticeable". His evidence for this is Hotmail's failure to lose customers.
My counterargument is that any mail lost by Hotmail's blocking (if you don't pay) has not been all that inconvenient to the user, and that's why it's not noticeable. In other words, so what if some mail messages get lost? If this were so horrible, then users would be up in arms, there would be news stories about it, and there would be active message boards replete with bitching.
As is, it seems that the one inconvenienced and thus bitching is one particular sender of mass e-mail, and his bitching has taken the form of this "insightful article". So it seems to me that this one inconvenienced person is trying to magnify his/her own frustration by portraying his/her issue as an issue that affects/will affect "all users".
From what I can tell, there is no big problem for the users. They're not a bunch of stupid sheep who are completely clueless that they're not getting mass e-mail from groups that they signed up for. And if they're missing mass e-mail from groups that they didn't sign up for, then I think that the users would see that as a blessing. We need less spam, not more!
The other part of the article's argument is: "This will pave the way for an e-mail tax and we'll all have to pay." Argument by fear, slippery slope, missing a few in-between steps, assumes that users are stupid morons, etc.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Mandatory SPF? SPF works best if an entity only allows email out from a hand full of hosts. IF you have users that roam that is not always possible. What if your sitting in a coffee shop and want to send out email but the coffee shop, not wanting to be a harbinger of spam has blocked port 25. You now have to send email out via the coffee shops smtp server. If your work admin has set up a sane SPF ruleset you would now be spam considered spam. Well, you could always get aound using port 25 and use an alternate port and relay the email for your roaming users. Unfortunutaly there is no OFFICIAL alt port, but there is a CONSENSIUS on one. Which also means that there is no way of knowing if the coffee shop will block that port as well. If you work for a place that has no telecommuters, all the different forms of "Send From" anti-spam will work fine. For road warriors, its just crap.
The author of this piece is using Hotmail's paid whitelisting as an example of why the market doesn't always fix problems because Hotmail users aren't ditching Hotmail. This is logically flawed because the majority of Hotmail users are not customers in the sense that AOL customers are - most Hotmail users are getting the service for free, so they aren't likely to complain about Hotmail's whitelisting policies. AOL is very different - its customers pay a premium for AOL service, and are therefore quite likely to ditch AOL when the service isn't worth the monthly fee; AOL's long decline in subscribers evidences this quite clearly.
People need to stop treating pay-per-email as a market leader trying to shove a bad idea down the collective throat of internet users. AOL is dying - albeit slowly - and AOL users have long been considered the dregs of the internet, not typical users with needs to be catered to. Pay-per-email is just another crappy scheme by AOL to try and survive without having to actually compete by offering quality service at a reasonable price. It won't save AOL, and in the long run, it will be written off as just another crappy idea from a dying tech firm.
to block any (and all) email they want to. Your ISP is under no obligation to deliever "all" email - if they did they could not block spam. Collateral damage could not occur. Most virulent anti-spammers would be out of luck.
The problem is that delivery of email is not a neutral, third-party kind of thing. How can a any email sender prove (and I mean "beyond a reasonable doubt") they are not a spammer? They can't. Rule 1 is Spammers Lie. Therefore, no matter what someone says, if they send you an email you don't want, they are by definition a spammer. At least in some people's eyes.
The problem is that ISP's are influenced by these people and feel the need to take "action", regardless of how ill-advised or inappropriate that action might be. The result is that people don't get all the email that people are sending to them. Unfortunately, this is now viewed as a problem with the sender being at the mercy of the ISP or other delivery agent. And now, they want to charge completely unreasonable amounts of money for delivering purchase receipts to customers.
This is a huge problem for my company that we have to deal with every day. The answer is not "prove you're not a spammer and we'll let you through", because that kind of proof is Bonded Sender and Goodmail.
Unfortunately, no, your email is not your property. Once a copy is on your computer, you have right to it as with any other data on your machine but you don't own the data on the various servers involved in transmitting your message to you. Until your message reaches your computer, it's just data on someone else's system. And, for free web-based services, that data is never yours as it's never on your computer, aside from what is cached during the browsing session. At most, depending on the providor's usage agreement, you're granted certain rights to the message once it's within their systems.
Unless you have a contractual agreement with a company to provide service to you, as in the case of an ISP you pay for and that contractually states your mail delivery expectations, there is no guarantee that your email will reach you. The free services, Hotmail, Gmail, etc all explicitely state on their usage policy pages that their service is offered with no warranty, express or implied, regarding the services they provide to you. There is no implied warranty that you'll even receive your email, let alone "that your contacts will be able to send you mail for free". At most you can argue that by paying AOL to provide internet services you have an expectation of receiving email (as email is part of internet services and somethign an ISP would be expected to provide), but even that all depends on their usage policy/contract. I would think at most you could claim a service interruption unless the usage policy/contract allows for such interruptions.
In AOL's case, they've ammended their usage policy (which is referenced in their subscriber agreement/aka contract) to include their use of GoodMail. Therefore, continuing to use AOL is agreeing to have your email blocked by AOL and you have no legal recourse for those messages not reaching you (you do actually read that small print, right
What I would find to be an interesting legal argument would be whether or not blocking senders who don't pay would qualify as discrimination. And in one sense, the practice is comparable to extortion: pay us or you'll get degraded service compared to everyone else. I would think this whole argument would be a long the same lines as the attempts by telcos to charge for preferential traffic prioritization.
This article implies that moveon.org actually does support a free market philosophy for something (not this obviously). What a bunch of crap. That said, this is one of many reasons why one should stay away from the AOLs and Hotmails of the world.
"Free" market model , in the way it is often sold by many spin doctors, is a subset or a reinterpretation of the perfect competition market model (PCMM)
If did you homework and your studying you know that PCMM is founded on some hypothesis and particulary on the following one
- Perfect information -
Which translates in layman terms :
a) everybody with no exception knows always exactly what they need to know to take a rational decision
to buy or sell
b) they know what they need to know exactly when they need it, there is no delay interfering with the decision
c) all the players in the market have the same information at the very same time
These assumption are unrealistic in the sense that they will NEVER be met, but maybe they can be closely approximated ; people familiar with the calculus concept of limit know what kind of approximation I am referring to.
Now for the "self adjusting market" : market isn't an abstract person, an omnipotent god that works on his own, decides on his own and naturally always balance itself ; that is a delusion sold by some spin doctor to sell the story of Adam Smith (one of the first economists of all times) talking about "invisible hands" doing good for everybody in the market. They connected this notion of "invisible force" to "self balancing" to create the impression of market as "necessarily balacing for the best of everbody" , expecially for the consumer.
That would happen if consumers had perfect information and constantly made rational choices and if power concentration like monopoly choosed to follow market demand. That doesn't happen : few key players can influence the way products are perceived (see Microsoft) on a scale big enough to affect the whole market, even when they don't control the market by means of restricting or enlarging offer.
Hotmail may not block mailings for "random reasons", but they certainly do block emails from certain companies for reasons completely unrelated to whether the mailing is spam or not.
My company has clear opt-in policies in place and we have clearly marked opt-out/unsub links on every mail we send. We regularly check our mailings against filters such as server-based solutions like Spam Assassin and Brightmail as well as client-side filters such as Outlook's own filters. We fix any problems these filters flag and we don't send out mailings that don't pass these filters
But Hotmail blocks 100% of our mails. At the server level. It never gets through to any folder of Hotmail users who have subscribed to our mailings.
I hate posting as an AC, and I hate not mentioning why Hotmail blocks us, but when it comes to M$ paranoia is often justified. The reason they block us has nothing to do with the content of our mailings. And these are solicited mailings ... people have opted-in to receiving them. So, as mentioned in the article, Hotmail is denying its users a service they have asked for from a third party (my company) and because these mailings are not scheduled to arrive on any particular day or at any particular time, the users have no real means of knowing their requests are being blocked.
AOL wants to be considered a "common carrier." In other words, they are not responsible for what you get when you surf the internet. If you type in an address in your browser and see nudity, then caveat emptor! AOL isn't responsible... they're just passing along your request and sending you back your results. They can't be sued for what you see on the Internet.
When AOL decides to censor parts of the internet, then should then be held liable. EMail is just another service that they provide. It's not the Internet, but simply a protocol. If AOL says they give you an email account, then this should imply that they are following the relevant protocols and RFCs regarding email and delivery. They do not say anywhere that they are censoring things.
If AOL doesn't follow the protocols, then they can be seen to be censoring. When that censorship is broken (they don't censor enough, or they censor too much), then they should be held liable.
AOL refuses to send any email that my system sends to any of their customers. It simply bounces the message. About half the time, they don't even send a bounce message back. This violates the protocol. And it's censorship.
My system is listed in DNS as the MX for my domain. I also added SPF and other related "guarantee" records to my domain. Still, AOL refuses to deliver any email that my mail server sends--it censors them outright. If I send the same message, but instead of sending it directly to AOL, I send it through my ISP's mail server, AOL will deliver it. Why? "Your system might be compromised."
MIGHT??? It's a bleeding mail server with MX records and SPF and all that other stuff! Why not tag it as potential junk mail and let the recipient decide? What you are doing is simply censorship!
"Too complicated."
"But you are violating the protocols!"
No answer. They're AOL. They don't care. They don't have to.
So, I make an exception. There are too many AOL customers and AOL's obstinate stance in this gave me no choice. Route any email to AOL through my ISP. I hate it... it adds one more party to the equation... one more party that might drop the message, might decide to eavesdrop on my message, might decide to consider its own rules for what is acceptable to deliver on their behalf. But I do it. I hold my nose and put in that exception.
Whoops! cs.com is giving me the same error. Well, they're owned by AOL. Add it to the list. Then nls.net... ameritech.net... comcast.net... juno.com...
WTF?
Since AOL does it, everybody has jumped in on this bandwagon. "Censorship is fun! You're a spammer, plain and simple. We can't back it up, but you might be one, and we can't take the risk of delivering your email."
What risk? I'm not a spammer! I'm sending a single message to just one of your customers. How is this SPAM? Look at the content! It's a reminder that there's a band practice at 8pm. How is that SPAM?
No answer. They are ISPs. They don't care. They don't have to.
Now, AOL decides that this isn't good enough. "Pay this person $2,000 and he'll tell us that you aren't spamming. We'll give your message a blue ribbon!"
How isn't this extortion? I'm not a big corporation with lots of greenbacks to hand out. I just want to send a reminder to Bobbie Sue! You are saying you won't censor my email if I pay somebody. Does the term "RICO" mean anything to you?
No answer. This is AOL. They don't care. They don't have to.
The post office has been around for many years. They have delivered many messages to many people. Some messages have been fraudulent. Some have been used in the commision of a crime. I have yet to see them decide simply looking at the return address of an envelope that a letter isn't worth delivering. (Those letter carriers that do this themselves "as a service to their customers" are usually terminated when their activities are discovered.)
If AOL and the other ISPs want to be considered common carriers and not responsible for all the content of the internet, then fine.
STOP CENSORING OUR EMAIL!
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
Bennett's right. The other side to this is that we at EFF thought hard about how this could be amended so the market could step into fix these problems, and we think the patch would be fairly straightforward.
The big problem with Goodmail is that it's providing a certification service *and* a revenue stream to ISP intermediaries. So given this new money stream, it's a real temptation for these ISPs to shimmy everyone over to it in the hope of increasing a flow of money from a group who are in many ways the perfect ISP customers: third-party senders (after all, they can't unsubscribe from you, they don't need any maintenance beyond skipping your spam filters, and, hey, no marketing budget: in email tax world, customers cold call *you*).
So, the fix would be: dump the ISP revenue share. That way, there's fairier entry for new entrants into the certification market (because they would be competing for effectiveness as a signaller of good actors, rather than competing on how much money they can hand over to ISPs), and a fairer market for alternative anti-spam/phishing solutions (since an ultra-cheap solution that emerges would get widespread adoption without ISPs saying "well, it's nice, but we make good money from this other system, and if all the false positives went away, our profits from that would actually diminish").
Markets are great tools, but you can have dysfunctional markets if you don't have the correct cultural constraints. Bribery and corruption are great impeders of free market behaviour in many societies. Many markets suffer because the idea of including a bit of cash to sweeten the deal with intermediaries is a given, rather than fiercely disapproved of. When you've got a fledgling market like the email trust overlay so many people are helping build, you have to make sure the right instincts take hold from the get go.
I get hit with over 1,000 "spams" a day at my personal address. (Yes, my filters catch most of them, but I'm talking raw numbers sent). While some of that is spam, most of it is scams, viruses, etc. And even the spam is primarily from people who aren't likely to pay even a penny for 100 mails, much less 4.
OTOH, I send and receive a lot of legitimate email. I pay for this when I pay for my connectivity. I shouldn't have to pay agin.
Now if you let *me* decide how much a spammer has to pay me before s/he can send an email to my box, that's another issue. For $100, *anyone* can send me one email on anything. I'll even promise to read it so long as it doesn't require more than one minute of my time. And I'll give 10% to charity and 10% to my ISP to license the technology. No problem.
Because that implies that it is just technology not working. But, if you want full disclosure, tell the people that you don't send to AOL and Hotmail, because they consider your missionary email to be "Junk", and hides it from the user. The point of a "Junk Mail" folder is to hide the junk mail.
Then proceed to explain that AOL and Hotmail wants you to pay $2000 to spread the word of God without their active interferance.
In fact, it seems to me that this "blue ribbon" certification is a heaven-sent opportunity for con-artists everywhere: pay Goodmail, and lots of naive AOL users are going to think the "blue ribbon" guarantees that the offer is legit. Of course, that could create long-term liability issues for AOL...
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
(I'm posting anonymously for the same reasons as the above poster, and with the same general dislike for having to do so.)
You're not the only one.
We provide a bunch of services, among them web hosting, email redirection, etc.
If email is redirected to an AOL account, there is a very good chance that it won't reach the recipient at all. It won't be marked as junk, just not delivered.
We're recommending that our customers stop using Hotmail for their "free" email service, and instead use other, not-so-bad alternatives.
As for AOL, AOL is already acting out its role of arrogant service provider to such an extent that we've also had to ask our customers to ask their recipients of email to use a different service provider for email.
Unfortunately, we're not anywhere big enough to take on Hotmail and AOL on our own, just a few tens of thousands of customers, but there are several others with the same sentiments.
Perhaps this will, in time, be enough to make AOL and Hotmail reconsider.
There are laws against sending certain types of things unsolicited. It should not apply to you, but I'd hate to see you get caught up in that type of litigation. Do what I do: send them peanut butter spread in the pages they sent to you. This way they either personally recieve your contribution and after several times decide to take your name off their lists or their automated mail machine gets a delicious peanut-buttery spread that will slow it to a crawl until a tech cleans it out. After a few expensive service calls, they will get the message. PS: I always write on it to tell them about the peanut butter. IANAL, but informing them should lessen any liability that they should try to assign. source: http://www.mcgladrey-family.us/kayne/archives/2003 /06/06/making_junk_mail_illegal
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
I think the posted missed a few things with their main argument that "a market solution only works when users can see what's happening."
Uh, people will know if mailing lists they're on are getting marked as spam. They can then whitelist that mailing list themselves to make sure THEY at least always get it.
If people don't do that because they never notice they're not getting the mailing list, then gee, maybe they don't value that mail they're not getting too highly.
And either way, the market wins!
I'm not saying I think pay for email is a great idea, I'm just saying I think you have to give "the market" a little more credit.. and if it sucks, it'll die, and if it doesn't, it won't, and life will go on.
Yes, I said it, the legiatamate mass mailers are part of the problem.
What would you say if a corporation started one of the following as business practoces:
A) Because of the high crime rate among conveience stores, all clerks will be issued guns and told to point them at the customer at all times.
B) Our salesman will run up to you, whip out a bottle of perfume point it at you and say PAY ME $25!
C) When you arrive at our gas car wash, masked men will remove you from your car, get in, and drive it into the carwash.
Customers would object to this. They have the right to object to this. The problem is that the activities being proposed, while they may be legal, APPEAR illegal. It is both stupid and irresponsible for businesses to engage in activities that are that close to being illegal.
It is the responsibility of the legitamate mass-emailers to distinguish themselves from spam. If they can't do this, then they should not be engaging in mass-emailing at all. If you can't convince hotmail that you are not spam, then you have an unethical business model.
Yes, this may force people to STOP using mass-email. There is no right to use it. Yes, you may like it, but it is argueable about ANY of it being 'legitamate', and it is up to you to find a way to prove you are legitamate, not up to the email service suppliers to prove you are not legiatamate.
There are lots of ways to deal with sending out large amounts of data daily. Message boards work fine. The g-d d-mned adware junk could also be converted to legitamate use, downloading your message once/day instead of via email.
If you can't clean up your act so your so called legitamate email is indistinguishable from spam, then you business model deserves to go down in flames.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
What's really annoying for business is the possibility that recipients' ISPs will drop your email silently as opposed to giving you an error message that tells you they did it so you can find other ways of contacting them. Even if it's not worth a penny for every email you want to send to somebody, it _might_ still be worth a penny to send them mail saying "Hi, AOL's blocking our email to you, please give us another email address or else get them to whitelist us."
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
So, if the blue ribbon means it bypasses the spam filters, does that mean I have no way of "blacklisting" an email either? If I continue to get email that I choose not to get and what to permanently filter it, will I be unable to because of this blue ribbon? My guess is that I won't, since any mailer who uses the service is probably promised that his email will go through and find the recipient's inbox guaranteed.
I work with a clinic that does email notifications of appointments
Are you in the United States? Do you send these notifications in plain text? My understanding of HIPAA regulations would rule out any such plain-text notifications. I suppose if you're really careful and just say "you have an appointment next Wednesday at 3 pm" you might be okay. But if you say "with Dr. So-and-So" I think you've crossed the line. Suppose I'm an employer, and I intercept such a notice to one of my employees. Being a nosy sort, I check out who Dr. So-and-So is and discover she's a specialist in breast cancer. Now the employee didn't tell me she (potentially) has breast cancer, but I decide that keeping her on might result in a rise in my medical insurance premiums so I let her go as soon as possible.
Hell, I didn't even want to enable patients to view private medical information online even with good authentication, SSL, etc., to preserve the integrity of the connection. What happens if I stop by an employee's desk and casually hit the back button in his browser a few times? I might come across private medical information lurking in the browser's cache.
Is an "Email Blast" a spamming technique? If so, one of Canada's top news aggregators is advertising that they do them.
It doesn't currently cost anything cost to even 1 cent per message. My point is that even if you made it cost as much ast 2-3 cents per message, you're no where neer expensive enough to make it unprofitable for the spammer. You couldn't raise the per message cost high enough to stop the spammer without also stopping the not-for-profit email lists and so on. The spammer will have more money to spend, and has proven more than willing to spend it.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Hi there - as the relatively new owner of Bonded Sender, I can only say two things here: 1) We are making very substantive changes to the program now, the first wave of which will be announced in April 2) We have solicited a lot of feedback from all sides of the equation here, and we are always open to more feedback on how to make the program suck less, or even how to make it great. Feel free to send any of it my way - matt @ returnpath.net, and I can forward it on appropriately here. Matt Blumberg CEO, Return Path
The USPS has done exactly what AOL is trying to do. They have catered to big business that can see an ROI on their investment. Everyone else that sends letters 'First Class' and isn't trying to spam postal patrons gets screwed.
You're forgetting, I think, that all that "postal spam" people complain about subsidizes the first-class mail rate. In other words, if the post office decided to quit accepting bulk-rate-postage-paid mail, your first-class rate would go up, despite the perception otherwise due to bulk-rate being cheaper.
Why? Because the USPS makes anyone who is sending bulk mail do a lot of their work for them. It's not a choice, either, as I understand it -- if your mail volume is more than so many identical pieces per period of time, you must use the bulk system, do all the preprocessing, ensure that your mail is properly packaged, etc. or the USPS won't deliver for you even at the first-class rate (otherwise the whole system would fall down as businesses would simply opt not to take on all the overhead operations required to send bulk-rate mail).
If the USPS terminated the bulk rate, they'd have to take all that overhead back on, or simply quit accepting bulk mail (which I'm not sure they'd legally be allowed to do). Either way the cost of first-class delivery would rise.
So the best course is to find a use for all that bulk mail (firelighters is a good one -- the inks in the four-color glossy stuff make pretty colors!), and quit complaining since every piece of it you receive means you pay a little bit less for the mail you send.
-- Old Man Kensey
SSHv2 supports tunneling/port forwarding. If there's a machine on the other end that can listen on SSH, set up port forwarding so that you can use, say, localhost:10025 as your SMTP server. If you like local e-mail clients, this method is transparent to them, provided that you have set up the SSH connection first. As an added bonus, your password and e-mail don't travel in cleartext from your computer to the server. That's not a huge bonus, of course, since TLS already would have encrypted your password, and the e-mail will be in cleartext after the SMTP server sends it unless you used GnuPG or something to encrypt it, but at least someone sitting in the same coffee shop as you won't be able to sniff the traffic.
In the case of Goodmail, it will cost $12.50 to send a newsletter to 5000 people. When compared to the cost of traditional postage, I really don't think that's expensive.
We could even further reduce the price by allowing someone with a Goodmail service to whitelist a Goodmail-approved sender. Specifically, a sender sends a Goodmail-paid email asking the reciever to add the sender to the whitelist. Subsequent emails are freely whitelisted, but have no blue ribbon.
No, I will not work for your startup
... is more like a gray list.
I work for company that sees a ton of traffic from MSN, yahoo and AOL. Through partnerships with these portals we host content that makes everyone involved a good deal of money. We also use "opt-out/opt-in" emailing on our registration pages. Not Spam. One of these emails is a daily alert of the new data in the specific area the user was searching in. Now when the "brilliant" AOL user gets sick of these emails do they click on our "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of the email? NO! They click the nice and easy to find spam button next to the email without even reading it.
Now the spam filter system that AOL uses is a sort of threshold system. If enough people report a specific sender as spam then they get blacklisted and then our customers who rely on these emails get pissed. All that their "white list" does is increase that threshold, it does not, however, gaurentee our email will get through.
Even though we have a partnership with them they will still blacklist us if enough people report us as spam. We have since had to setup a feedback loop where by if someone clicks the spam button on one of our emails AOL will send us the email (without the email address) and we have to figure out how to unsubscribe them from our lists.
retarded!
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
If the USPS terminated the bulk rate, they'd have to take all that overhead back on, or simply quit accepting bulk mail (which I'm not sure they'd legally be allowed to do). Either way the cost of first-class delivery would rise.
Perhaps, although this is by no means guaranteed. If bulk-rate was more expensive volume should go down. Reduced volume should result in the need for fewer carriers and reduced overhead. Most mail is sorted by machine anyway. It's difficult to say what the end result would be.
So the best course is to find a use for all that bulk mail (firelighters is a good one -- the inks in the four-color glossy stuff make pretty colors!), and quit complaining since every piece of it you receive means you pay a little bit less for the mail you send.
You are correct there, complaining doesn't help. It's not going to change the system and I can't really opt out. It will be interesting to see what ultimately happens to the USPS. I anticipate, especially as postage rates continue to rise, that eventually even major bulk snail mail advertisers will turn to electronic delivery and the USPS will be in serious trouble.
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Is if the major part of fee for getting an email through actually goes to the intended recipient, rather than to any third party. A third party may collect a small part of the fee as commission for the service. It would be even better if the recipient could specify the mail fee for email to get through to him/her.
This way, spam companies will have to pay the recipient of their emails for each and every email. It would add up pretty quickly for mass mailings, making them few and far between or, at the very least, they would become super-targeted at interested audiences.
On the other hand, for personal email between friends or relatives, the fee would cancel out as they would effectively be paying each other; better yet, after a few emails, they could whitelist each other's email addresses and not have any more fees for email between them.
This is the way the marketplace should work for pay-for-email.
Private companies do not have the absolute right to do whatever they want with your mail. If you sign up to receive mail from someone, and they send you an e-mail, then that e-mail is your property
I'm afraid this is not correct. I know in this day and age of everything-is-a-rightisms that it sounds good, but in practice it's simply untrue. Email is a service that ISPs provide, and they provide it according to their terms of service, which undoubtably includes a "best-effort" clause.
If you wish to receive an email from a mailing list, the thing to do is to ensure that that the email address is in your personal whitelist. AOL, et. al. will make best-efforts to deliver mail otherwise, but they also have a responsibility (and need, BTW) to prevent spam.
(I'm not just blowing smoke either--I'm dealing with the AOL problem now, trying to get on the whitelist for a newsletter that I'm responsible for. I know from which I speak, and while I'm not thrilled, when it comes down to it, it's AOL's servers. It's not their problem that they're popular.)
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
My system drops twelve to fourteen thousand spam messages per day. (For comparison, we accept about three to four thousand legitimate messages per day). I am certain that if it cost the sender even a penny per message, my volume of spam would drop 90%.
In this article, I pretty much hear Bennett Haselton whining that he doesn't get to send messages to people with certain email addresses - unless he posts a $2,000 bond. I can sympathize that $2,000 is a lot of money, and frankly that does seem too high. Would Mr. Haselton complain if the bond were $50?
Remember - you only lose your bond if people report you as a spammer. If someone reports you as a spammer, it is probably in your financial best interest to put them on your own personal 'do-not-email' list. Mr. Haselton probably doesn't want his message going to people who find it annoying.
Which cuts down on my spam rate - hey... we both win.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
It's kind of ridiculous that we even still use email in it's present incarnation. The current email system needs to hit the shit can where it belongs. Time to replace it with a better system.
1. Pay $5/year for a domain.
2. Use an ISP that'll host it at no extra charge.
3. Set up a catch-all forward. (e.g. [anyprefix]@yourdomain.com all goes to a specific email address.)
4. Use different addresses for every purpose. (e.g. sign up to store.com w/ store@yourdomain.com - maillist.com uses maillist@yourdomain.com - etc.)
5. Consider buying multiple domains to keep your options open.
All the email still goes into one convenient box.
When you start receiving spam addressed to a particular address, forward that one to devnull@yourisp.com... and then make the connection that if abcstore@yourdomain.com gets spam, that they sell your address. They're assholes. Don't do business with them anymore. If they're in violation of their privacy policies, notify the correct parties.
Remember back not so long ago when you could sum up anyone with an AOL account as an idiot? Well, I, for one, won't feel guilty making that assumption again. AOL users that stay with AOL after this one will just end up being labelled as idiots. Matter of fact, I am creating a rule to auto-reply to all AOL e-mail with just such a tag line.
>> ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
...
Hmm. Is this the same person that is complaining about not receiving emails
"Cats like plain crisps"