ISPs Starting To Charge for 'Guaranteed' Email Delivery

Presto Vivace writes "Under the guise of fighting spam, five of the largest Internet service providers in the U.S. plan to start charging businesses for guaranteed delivery of their e-mails. In other words, with regular service we may or may not deliver your email. If you want it delivered, you will have to pay deluxe. 'According to Goodmail, seven U.S. ISPs now use CertifedEmail, accounting for 60 percent of the U.S. population. Goodmail--which takes up to 50 percent of the revenue generated by the plan--will for now approve only mail sent by companies and organizations that have been operational for a year or more. Ordinary users can still apply to be white-listed by individual ISPs, which effectively provides the same trusted status.'"

Comments

Re:Fighting spam?

[tacocat]

No, you are really wrong.

The point behind guaranteed delivery is that the ISP will not blacklist your domain/ip address regardless of how many spam reports they receive. This is the whole point behind goodmail.

I just spend hours in a meeting discussing this very topic. Our company was blacklisted by AOL because too many people reported our email as spam (it's all mail that they opted in for -- default is out). The result was all of AOL delivery was blacklisted. Eventually we got it fixed, but the next tier to the solution is to pay GoodMail $$ to effectively certify our domains as legitimate senders and they pay AOL a portion of their proceeds to guarantee permanent whitelist status no matter what the users do.

The only criteria that AOL has leveled against us is if someone tags our email as spam, we have to remove them from the mailing list. But I don't know if this will change or not with the introduction of GoodMail into our mail delivery system.

Infrastructure problem

[Loconut1389]

OK- so you've got the infrastructure to do pay-by-email set up. Now the end user has something like an iTunes account backed by paypal and it just sort of automagically charges your account every time you send an email, what happens when your machine is compromised by a bot-net and you're sending millions of emails for a quarter?

Whitelisting is a solved problem: Hashcash

[loqi]

One word: Hashcash. Basically you prove that you wasted a couple seconds worth of CPU to send your message. I believe SpamAssassin already recognizes Hashcash headers, not sure about other filters. But if you're really ready to start dropping email en masse in favor of a whitelist-style approach, this is the simple and elegant solution.