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What Happens If You Don't Pay for Goodmail?
If I could ask one serious question of anyone who was defending pay-per-email, or sitting on the fence about it, this would be it: Suppose you sent an extremely urgent e-mail to your doctor or your lawyer, who for the sake of argument you're not able to reach by phone. The recipient's ISP owner happens to see the message before the user retrieves it, and realizes how urgently you need to get it through. So he moves it to the recipient's "spam" folder, and then calls you up and says: pay me $1,000 to move it to the recipient's inbox, or they'll never see it.
Does the ISP have the right to do that? If not, why not?
Perhaps you'd say that Goodmail's 1/4-penny-per-message is reasonable, but $1,000 for one message is too much. But then who decides what is "too much"? The marketplace? Then isn't the ISP admin just another player in the market, and $1,000 is what they want to charge? If you don't like it, you can go somewh... oh, wait, you can't, because there's no other way to get through to the recipient. If you ever get through to your doctor or lawyer, they might switch ISPs after they hear what happened, but should that be your only recourse?
The problem with the ISP charging $1,000 to deliver your message is not that $1,000 is "too much", but that they're charging for a service that has already been paid for. If your doctor or lawyer pays for an e-mail address, they're doing so with the understanding that their ISP will make a reasonable effort to deliver the non-spam e-mails that people try to send them. If their ISP then turns around and asks you for $1,000 to deliver the e-mail, then they're trying to double-bill for the same service, and if they block the message because you don't pay the $1,000, then the ISP is cheating the recipient out of a service that they've already purchased. And it's not just the recipient being cheated; if the recipient has an arrangement with you, as your doctor or lawyer would, then the ISP is interfering in their business relationship with you.
Now, if an ISP using Goodmail offers to let you bypass their filters by paying 1/4 penny per message, how is that different from the doctor example? Well, on the face of it, it's different in at least two ways: first, because the ISP is charging "only" 1/4 penny per message instead of $1,000, and second, they're not saying that your mail will be blocked if you don't pay, only that it might be. But are these qualitative differences, or just differences in degree?
Take the cost-per-message. I have a (verified opt-in) mailing list of about 50,000 people that I send mail to twice a week. In the aggregate, it is just important for me to get mail out to those subscribers, as it is for some people to get a single mail through to their doctor or lawyer. Also, in the aggregate, it would cost me about $1,000 per month if the ISPs collectively asked for 1/4 penny per message and threatened to block them otherwise. So is there any real difference between requesting $1,000 to unblock 50,000 e-mails, and requesting $1,000 to unblock a single e-mail, if you're just doing it because you know the sender urgently needs to get them through? (It's not a reflection of the ISP's costs -- downloading and storing 50,000 messages at 3 K each, costs almost nothing, certainly not anything close to $1,000. And again, I would argue it's a moot point anyway, because those services have already been paid for.)
And how much difference is there, really, between saying that a message (or a group of messages) might be blocked, and saying that a message definitely will be blocked? If it's bad for your doctor's ISP to call you up and say, "Give me $1,000 or there's a 100% chance that your message doesn't get through," what if they say, "Give me $1,000 or there's a 50% chance that your message doesn't get through," isn't that at least 50% as bad? You could say that in my doctor example, the blocking was deliberate, but in the case of the spam filter, it's accidental. But if an ISP chooses not to fix problems with its spam filter, then in a way it's still deliberately creating a certain percentage of cases where the spam filter will block legitimate mail, even if those cases occur at random.
There is one more difference between Goodmail and the scenarios I've described, which is that Goodmail not only lets you bypass an ISP's spam filters, it also certifies that you are trusted and not a phisher. If an ISP like AOL controls the user-interface that a user uses to check their mail, it can display the blue-ribbon "CertifiedEmail" icon next to a Goodmail-certified message. In this case, an ISP can plausibly claim that they're letting all legitimate e-mail get through, but they're still offering a benefit to Goodmail senders. The problem with this is that since phishing only works on users who are gullible to begin with, a phish could just as easily display the CertifiedEmail icon in the body of the message to try and gain a user's trust. It's all very well to say that a user should know that the CertifiedEmail icon only "counts" when it's displayed in the inbox, not in the message itself. But a user who knows that, would probably also know that their bank's Web page is not 209.211.253.169. And besides, most users of Comcast, Cox, RoadRunner and Verizon will be using their own mail clients like Eudora which won't display the "CertifiedEmail" icon anyway.
So it seems pretty clear that the main benefit of using Goodmail will be deliverability. And that's the basic Catch-22: If an ISP gives the same deliverability to non-Goodmail-certified messages, then who's going to use it? On the other hand, if an ISP gives better deliverability to Goodmail-certified messages than to other messages (much more likely), then they are to some extent misrepresenting the services they sell to their users, since users expect an ISP to make the best effort to deliver all legitimate e-mails, not just the ones from paying senders.
Goodmail likens their service to FedEx or UPS for "enhanced delivery" of paper mail as a way of getting the recipient's attention. But the difference is that if you're trying to reach your lawyer, then the office complex where he works (or the city that maintains the streets to his house) is providing the service that he expects and has paid for, namely, allowing different companies to deliver stuff to him there -- and because you have different choices, that means FedEx, UPS and the USPS have to compete with each other, and that keeps the delivery prices down. On the other hand, if an ISP blocks you from mailing their customer unless you pay their fee, then the ISP is going against what the customer expects them to do, and it is precisely that betrayal of trust that gives the ISP a monopoly on your ability to reach the customer -- which leads to them charging monopoly-style prices, like $1,000 to receive and store a few tens of thousands of messages.
There is a lot of debate about whether "the market" would fix problems of legitimate e-mail being lost. Esther Dyson's editorial was a classic libertarian defense of the free market as the arbiter of systems like Goodmail: "If it's a good model, it will succeed and improve over time. If it's a bad model, it will fail. Why not let the customers decide?" Actually I don't think the free market does fix most e-mail deliverability problems -- I've been involved in a few business that sent bulk e-mail (to subscribers who requested it and confirmed their subscriptions), and have had conversations with dozens of others, and we've all had problems sending to Hotmail, AOL, and Yahoo, and I've never, ever heard anyone say that their deliverability problems were solved by "the market". (Usually the problems just come and go, and nobody knows why.) But in a way this is all beside the point. Even if the market would stop more egregious abuses, what gives ISPs the right to charge senders for e-mail services that their customers have already paid for?
I actually met Richard Gingras, the CEO of Goodmail, and Charles Stiles, the postmaster of AOL, at a conference in Seattle last year where they were on a panel defending against the Goodmail controversy. They seemed like nice guys who were genuinely blindsided by the criticism that Goodmail had been receiving. It's easy to see the point of view of Goodmail's defenders -- if Bob wants to pay Alice to "certify" Bob, why would it be anybody else's business? It isn't, until it leads ISPs to steer people towards a system where if you want to be treated like a non-spammer, you have to pay -- even if, strictly speaking, the recipient is already paying to receive your mail.
As for the much-vaunted free whitelisting privileges that non-Goodmail senders will continue to enjoy, in the pre-Goodmail era I once found that AOL was blocking some of my mail to their users, so I called their postmaster department and learned the following facts:
- The first person I talked to, said that he checked the logs and our mail was being blocked because we didn't have reverse DNS set up. I thought this was odd because we did have it configured, but I thanked him and hung up.
- Then, I called back and got someone different. I asked them the same question and they said that according to his logs, our mail was being blocked because someone else at our ISP was sending spam. I asked him why they were blocking our IP address, if it was different from the IP of the alleged spammer; he paused and said, "Is there anything else I can help you with?", and this repeated several times as I thought my phone or his headset wasn't working, before I realized he was just being a dork.
- Then, I called back and got yet another person, and this person said that he could see our mail was being blocked because it contained banned content. I was pretty sure that was wrong, because you get a different-looking bounce if you're sending mail that contains a banned string, but I took a note of that anyway.
- Then, I called back and got a fourth person, who said that our mail was being blocked because some of their users had flagged mail from our IP address as spam. He paused for a brief conversation in the background, then came back and added, "This has already been explained to you, sir." I said that since I had gotten four different explanations in four different phone calls, I figured I could just keep calling and tallying the votes that I got for each explanation, until one of them emerged as the winner.
Much later I found out from someone else about the AOL whitelisting program, which I'm currently trying to see if it prevents us from getting blocked. But if none of the people answering the phone at the postmaster department knew or told me about it (and I confirmed that it did exist at the time), how many other organizations or businesses don't know?
ISPs adopting Goodmail say that while Goodmail senders can bypass their spam filters, non-Goodmail senders will continue to enjoy the same deliverability rates that they have in the past. That's what I'm afraid of.
The argument here is predicated on the ridiculous premise that can only reach you need to reach your Doctor or Lawyer urgently (not so bad so far), but you can only do so though email.
Huh? Email isn't an urgent communications medium. Furthermore Doctors and Lawyers who need to be reached urgently have secretaries and nurses who do triage. They contact the Dr/Lawyer if it's truly urgent.
AccountKiller
Goodmail is a service for spammers to bypass spam filters for a fee. It is plain to see. By particpating, ISPs that use Goodmail have in effect become spammers themselves. Such ISPs should be avoided like the plague.
I only get around 10 parcels of mail a day. It is typically 70% "spam" but it's relatively easy to sort because there are only 10 parcels. If each day I received 500 parcels with still only 3 being things I requested (bills, letters from home, etc..) then I would be severely put off and would definitely be causing a stink. It costs money to send snailmail spam though, so it ends up not being worth the cost in many cases. And I have never received a viagra/penis enlargement ad in the snailmail either...probably something to do with the questionable legality of most of those offers.
Spam isn't a bigger deal than junkmail
YES, IT IS. It wastes YOUR ISP's hard-drive, it wastes YOUR time, and it wastes YOUR ISP's BANDWIDTH.
In snail mail at least the junkmailers pay for the mail. With SPAM, they're using YOUR resources to do business. Not to mention promoting the use of botnets and viruses and spyware. They're disrupting the whole e-mail system, don't you get it? About 90% of e-mail I get is spam. That's 10-to-1 ratio. If you don't consider that a big deal, then you've gotten so close to garbage that you forgot how "clean" smells.
Yep, you are correct about the spam issue.
But the larger issue is whether your ISP can or should be filtering your email (or prioritizing it).
I have no problem with INDIVIDUAL users signing up for such a service.
But when ISP's start signing up, it breeds abuse.
This reminds me of an anecdote ... a gentleman was talking to a young lady and asked her if she would have sex with him for a million dollars. After she thought about it for a moment, she said yes. Then he asked her if she would have sex with him for $50.
"What do I look like, some kind of hooker?" she demanded.
"We've already established that," he said. "Now we're just haggling over your price."
Goodmail has established who the hookers are among the ISP community.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
I have a (verified opt-in) mailing list of about 50,000 people that I send mail to twice a week.
Bulk distribution is what RSS feeds are for. If people really want your stuff, they'll subscribe to the feed. Then the recipient is in control. I'm not impressed by people who claim that people need to receive their newsletter / e-mail spam.
As for the strawman, you just sue your professional and their ISP. I have no doubt the ISP would get hit for actual, consequential and punative damages.
On another level, email should not be used for high-value communications without backup/acknowledgement. The internet just is _not_ reliable. Email is far less reliable than people suppose.
Paper spam wastes the environment. So does spam (through energy consumption; internet hardware has had to be significantly expanded to accomodate spam.) It's all bad.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If they are unable to operate e-mail for customers based on their current price, they need to raise prices, lower operating costs, or stop providing e-mail altogether. I pay my ISP for a service and I expect to get it without them extorting the websites I chose to do business with for additional "fees" for e-mail delivery or "fees" for preferred content delivery speed (the whole Net Neutrality thing).
If they aren't able to offer the services demanded at the market price, change or get out of the market and make room for someone who can.
I don't think the free market can solve all the world's problems, but in this case it does have a fair shot.
The dilemma presented in the writeup is that you can't get messages through to someone (your doctor, mailing list recipients, whoever) because their ISP is extorting you. The author then argues that the free market cannot respond because it is the recipient being screwed (by charging others for a service that the recipient has already paid for), but the recipient is unaware of this abuse because they can't receive the messages.
But, that last part is rather unlikely. You will still be able to contact the recipient elsehow: either by paying the silly fee at least once, or by phoning them, or using a recipient email address not linked to the ISP, or by posting something on a web-site.
Take the example of the mailing list. The author worries about the cost of sending mails to thousands of people. So, basically, your mailing-list signup could say something like "We won't send email to people on ISP X" or "We cannot guarantee delivery to ISP X... click here to find out more." If the user really wanted to sign-up to that mailing list, then they will be annoyed by this. Ultimately end-users will find out about what their ISPs are doing, and switch ISPs (or at least switch email providers).
So the recipients will be empowered to change their email provider. And I'm fairly certain this whole scheme will fail for precisely that reason. The end users (senders or receivers) don't get much of benefit from the service--certainly not a benefit commensurate to the cost. So they will not pay the fees, and the scheme will fail. (Notice that some people have called for nominal 'email costs' many times to prevent spam... such proposals never take off mainly because the users of email don't want that hassle or cost.)
I think it will be possible to vote with our wallets, and watch this little scheme die a painful death.
I get 3 expected items in the mail every month, along with items ordered an delivered. They're the only bills I have that don't have an electronic only option yet. Everything else I get is junk mail which has a hidden cost as well. The post office has to use more fuel to carry all the extra weight in their vehicles. I have to get it from the mail box, shred it, put it in a garbage bag, and have it picked up by the garbage man. The DMA companies didn't buy my shredder for me, they don't spend 15 minutes shredding junk every week, and they don't subsidize the cost of fuel for the garbage truck that stops at every house to pick up what most likely amounts to tons of extra garbage weight a year. They also don't care if some meth head stops by my mailbox, steals my junk mail, and uses one of the dozens of free credit card offers to steal my identity and start me down the road of a ruined credit rating. So the cost of junk mail is time, fuel, space, and security.
Telemarketers call you on cell phones, and I would assume that they pay a phone bill.
.001% is profitable. If it costs even a little bit to send spam, then such minute return rates will no longer be profitable. Mind you, I'm not in favor of charging for email. I agree with the thrust of your post that this is a bad idea.
Uh, no, they don't. I've never received a telemarketer call on my cell phone and if I were receiving the calls, I'd add the number to the "Do Not Call" registry.
You aren't going to prevent e-mail spam by even charging a nominal amount for e-mailing, you are just going to maybe lose the less profitable spammers.
Not true. Spammers operate because of the enormous economies of scale that exist with email. You can send out literally millions of emails for practically nothing. A tiny return rate - say
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
I'm a systems/network admin by trade, but right now I'm a graphic artist, so if I thought advertising was a waste I'd have to kill myself (or quit my job.) I don't feel that way. It's the unsolicited advertisements that I object to, and the untargeted ones.
Almost all of our advertising is pretty highly targeted (we're not the spray and pray types) so I feel pretty good about it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Cute, but it's not the same thing as the submitter is commenting about. If you're on the phone with someone who is being difficult (something I'm sure we've all had to deal with), there really is little you can do besides ask to speak with their superior and hope they comply. There is nothing you can do but call back later, hoping to get someone else or to talk with the receptionist's boss and report the treatment you received.
If you stop your thought process there, I can see how you might confuse the two examples as being the same. In both cases, there is little you can do to get your message through immediately (other than pay the price). However, in the receptionist example, I already pointed out the solution: call back later when the asshole receptionist is not there or report him/her, likely getting them fired so you never have to deal with them again. Any future receptionist is unlikely to attempt the same thing.
That's really the heart of the matter: getting a receptionist like the one you describe is a random, chaotic occurrence. Being forced to pay money for every email you send through an ISP is an institutionalized occurrence; it will happen every single time you attempt to communicate with the recipient over that medium. The reason that is a bigger issue than the receptionist, while the immediate effect is the same, is that it is much harder to remedy an institutionalized behavior. The receptionist can be fired and all future communications to that office are no longer burdened with payola. You can call the ISP and complain about the fact that your message is not getting through, but all you'll receive in reply is a canned message explaining about the burden of providing secure communications for their customers that they have so selflessly taken upon themselves and likely insinuating that you may be a spammer because you are unwilling to pay the fee. Alternatively you can call the doctor/lawyer and request they change their service provider because of the situation you experienced. They may even sympathize with you and want to rectify the situation, but simply may not be able to. Switching providers could be a significant expense in time, expertise, and fees, that they may be unwilling or unable to spend. In addition it may be altogether impossible given the limited availability of choice in ISPs (i.e. many places only have the possibility of service from one or two major providers - the ones likely to be using Goodmail).
Like it or not, ISPs institutionalizing a payola scheme is not a trivial matter. It has the potential to seriously hinder the way people use the Internet and has more sinister implications as well - if you seriously believe that they will keep the cost at some fraction of a cent and never increase it, well I can only hope you're one of the few who has the wool over their eyes.
Yes, but those filter ARE good because so many people make a "big deal" about spam, which was what the grandparent was questioning.
Kinda like saying "Why should I go to work? I have food on my table and all my bills get paid. I'm not busting my ass anymore.". Stop the work and see how fast your rosy situation changes.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
How long will it take for spammers to add a fake Goodmail header to all of the email they send?
This is not workable. In fact it is the single most selfish thing you can do.
You have no way of knowing if the message you respond to is spam or not. If it is spam then you respond to a forged email address which basically means you are spamming an innocent other person. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenge-response_sp am_filtering
I like many other admins consider these auto-responses spam and report them. Ultimately you will find yourself on email blacklists.
Do things like spamassassin never get false positives? When you register with a website and don't see the "confirmation" email in your inbox, you know to check the most recent entries in your junk folder and mark it non-spam. But what happens to legitimate emails which you are not expecting this very minute but which are identified as spam by your filter?
Remember that Goodmail isn't charging senders to get their mail delivered. The charge is to bypass the normal processing that the receiving ISP does to all e-mail and deliver directly into the recipient's inbox. If you don't pay Goodmail to get your mail certified then it still gets delivered, it just gets handled as normal everyday mail. Now if the receiving ISP starts dumping everything not flagged by Goodmail into the spam folder automatically that'll be another matter, but my problem there would be with the ISP and not Goodmail (unless Goodmail was telling the ISP to do this, but they aren't). That problem is one I'd have to take up with the recipient, though, since I'm not a customer of their ISP. But as long as it's the receiving ISP's choice how to handle Goodmail-marked mail, Goodmail and senders can do whatever they please as far as I'm concerned.
For myself, I'm a firm supporter of the ISP's right to filter incoming e-mail however they want. I like the fact that my ISP applies some pretty effective spam filters. I also like the fact that they're unlikely to bypass that filtering just because of a Goodmail signature on messages. The only thing I demand from an ISP is that they make it clear to customers what sort of filtering they do, so customers can decide whether they agree with it or not.
If their spam will be guaranteed to be delivered, and they choose to pay for it, what good is a spam filter on a server for?
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
How can the parent of this, and its parent both be modded to +5 Insightful, when they are opposed? I would think one is insightful and the other is not.
I always thought the idea of the moderation system was to push trolling down to the bottom and encourage an interesting exchange of ideas. You seem to be implying that there can only be one insightful way to comment on a subject. In any debate, proponents of each side might have valid and insightful points to make. True discussion of ideas shouldn't lead to binary outcomes.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Actually, once someone develops a service at a certain expectation, suddenly deviating from that can cause legal actions.
In this case I am pretty sure a judge would frown on this type of extortion.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If your doctor wants to use an ISP that restricts his email, that's his business. You can certainly go to another doctor, but you aren't his ISP's customer (he is), so if he's happy with an ISP that charges people to send him mail, that's his call, not yours. If the ISP wanted to only accept mail from domains that start with Q, then it could do so - your doctor might have grounds to complain, especially if they didn't inform him of it, but you certainly don't - his service, his payment, his call.
"I'm against junk snail mail as well. Even though it doesn't cost me per se, it wastes my time, and unlike tv and web ads, I don't get anything in return for it."
Unless you never send anything via post, you most certainly do get something out of it, at least in the US. The US Post Office is pretty much subsidized by spam. You may think 41c for 1st class mail is a lot, but it would probably be triple that if it had to bear the costs of providing reliable mail service to every legitimate postal address in the country.
Goodmail is in essence creating a new way for "legitimate businesses" like coke, nike or mortgage lenders to spam people. Let's not be confused here, these are bulk email rates not for individual to individual. Businesses are really desperate for ways to reach people with their marketing, and sending unsolicited email gets too much backlash and negative attention. Many companies get big money from other companies wanting to reach customers who have opted into their mailing lists, the ISPs and email providers want a piece of that action.
This isn't in any way meant to help email subscribers or recipients reduce junk email, it is meant to increase junk email.
If they didn't deliver advertisements, they would only need to deliver mail once or twice a week. nobody uses regular mail for quick correspondences anymore. There is no need to deliver 6 days a week.
Absolutely correct... now, convince the union which controls the employees of the nation's second largest employer that you're going to need to eliminate more than half of their jobs since you're going down to 1 day a week. You'll, of course, still need to staff and manage the actual post office, distribution/sorting centers and transport mail between centers/offices but you'll cut down from 5 deliverers to 1. You could also cut down the transport between offices but some bills still can't be paid over the internet so I think people would prefer that their mail actually moves. What is now a 3 day trip might take 3 weeks if we cut back interoffice transport. Nevermind Granny or poor people who can't afford computers; To hell with them for being luddites.
Over time, times every person checking mail in the country, yeah, it does come to a lot. Which without advertisements would be less since you wouldn't need to get regular mail any more. see previous point.
Ever stop to think that it is the junk mail which makes up a core foundation of the post office's income? I've gone from mailing out 9 bills a month to mailing out 2, so they're definitely getting less money from me. However, their infrastructure costs aren't going down any time soon (nor will they go down if the union has anything to say about it). You can let advertisers pay that cost or you can raise taxes on every individual to support an ad-free mail system that they're still going to retire. Me? I'd rather keep paying the $10 or so a year I pay right now than pay an additional chunk of money in taxation.
Yeah, if you have nearby neighbors, the smoke will settle on their property until your chimney heats up. oh and don't forget of all the poisonous carcenigens you are putting in the air from the ink and paper processing materials.
Yeah... because most of of my neighbors burn fuel oil... it is so much healthier for everyone. Not to mention people using coal and putting trace amounts radioactive material up in the air. How do you recommend heating a home in NY six months a year in a way that won't have any negative impact whatsoever? I use a handful of paper once every few days when I accidentally let the fire burn out. Ooooh, scary.
That is completly false. While cheap, mass spammer do pay for the privilidge. Do you think the major providers don't know when someone sends 100K of emails...in fact you can pay them to be able to do that.
Ever hear of a botnet? If you have 20,000 machines each sending 5 mails, its a lot harder to track down. The boxes most likely to be sending out 100k at a time are corporate machines which have been hijacked and generally, their providers don't care too much what they do with their T3/OC line since they're selling connectivity/bandwidth not user services. The business has to employ someone to maintain that server to make sure it stays secure and to notice when it is spewing out 100k mails at a time. There are expenses for everyone out there running a mail server (employees, hardware failure, processing expansion for filtering, disk expansion, etc). If you have a website with a poorly laid out form (pick a random PHP project), you can end up with that form allowing people to send out spam (and good luck if you're the "IT guy" in a small business running the site because you're the one who knows why the computer won't turn on when the monitor is unplugged). Sending spam is MASSIVELY cheaper in comparison to junk mail. "Want to email a million addresses? Sure, we can do that for you for $25." "Want to junk mail a million mailboxes? Sure, that'll be $130,000." The spammer bears almost none of the cost associated with their endeavor, it is all passed on to the recipients and intermediaries so there is no incentive to carefully target their adv
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
There's nothing stopping a company from using bulk mail rates too. It's not the same. Which was my point with the analogies. They usually don't fit and only confuse the argument.