Submitted by AOL and Yahoo! are to start charging for sending emails. Both companies will still accept free emails but are offering the chance to pay to avoid their spam filters. By paying between a quarter and one cent per message companies will get preferential delivery of their messages. So a “business class” email will go straight to an AOL-subscriber’s inbox marked with a stamp saying “AOL Certified Email” while a free email will have to run the gamut of AOL spam filters. Free mails may also have images and web links removed.
Man, I must say – these companies are getting greedy – or is it that we have been using email for so long for free that we have gotten spoilled?
Personally I use Yahoo as my spam email anyway (and hotmail for the same purpose too), so I could care less
I agree, this is why I (like so many other geeks) have my own email server. I’m the only one that can put forth crazy mail filters on my account.
Yes, I’ve my own mailserver too… just for one person, me. It rocks. Server side rules, scripts, filters, custom actions, all stored in maildir folders, with my own webmail, and SSL IMAP. I really like it. Backup is as easy as rsyncing to another computer. Any geek can do it with postfix, dovecot and squirrelmail.
Anyone should run his/her own server to avoid being dependant on companies who give away email services for free. Mind you, I actually do have a gmail account. Only to send invites to others, not to use it myself 🙂
Your own mail server might not help in this case. The mail you’re go to be paying for is to by pass Yahoo and AOL’s filters into their own mail box.
They can still filter out any of your mail you send to them from non-AOL/Yahoo accounts and in many cases if you’re on a dynamic IP address that the mail server is sent from and the mail server that takes delivery uses SORBS etc or the reverse DNS doens’t match IP’s DNS (domain name for example) and causes an invalid Sender-ID, then you message might never get to who you’ve sent to them to anyway.
If you friends are on AOL, time to find new friends.
I choose not to have friends who use AOL
I’d never use a free email service that blocks images and links. I’d never consider paying per email. Old flabby millionaire suits are trying to figure out how to get more money. They’re no different from the RIAA.
Now, that they are marking it with “Business-class junk”, it will be soo much easier to filter out the crap.
The way I see it, aol and yahoo are going to have a premium feature that allows you to pay to by pass their spam filters.. ideal for the people who want to pay to spam you. Ofcourse, the charges are going to have to be high enough to counter the profit made from spamming users.. so it’ll be seen if it actually works.
Having mail ‘Certified’ because it’s been paid for is a very bad move. I can see it now, some spammers pay for it to be certified telling the user they have to download such and such because this is a ‘Certified’ email. They get spy/advert software installed on their pc. Spammers make money that out weighs the price of the mail costs.
Thanks for the fearmongering + 1. I was actually worried until I read the actual New York Times article.
Basically, if you pay per e-mail it goes straight to the recipient’s inbox. If too many people report you as a spammer, your access is revoked.
Otherwise, sending/receiving e-mail works exactly as it does right now: very well.
Sheesh.
The only real worry would be AOL/Yahoo! intentionally tweaking the spam filters to catch commercial e-mails that would not otherwise be caught by a spam filter due to content. But then you’re going into conspiracy theories.
Edited 2006-02-06 20:05
If any of you would bother RTFA, you would notice this is for bulk emailers only. Personal emails will be handled as before. So the guy saying it is time to find new friends not on AOL or Yahoo!….well, I suggest he quit being so lazy and RTFA!
My only concern with this is that perhaps this is a pilot project of sorts. It is not unreasonable to speculate that if this model of charging bulk mailers to certify email is successful that Yahoo! and AOL (and probably others) will not extend the ‘service’ to business that have moderate email use. If the concept becomes common it could slowly be rolled out to consumers. I seem to remember Bill Gates mentioning that paying for email could be a method to stop spam sometime in the past.
While this news has no immidiate threat, in the future we may all have to pay to send email that is certified in an effort to stunt spam. While stopping spam would be the justifiction the real reason would likley be that ISPs need to find new ways to make money as the market for the Internet becomes saturated.
The day we have to pay to send email, or instand messages, will be sad.
I look at this with a bit of trepidation, but also hope. Hope that it will, in fact, finally hurt the spammers.
If Yahoo and AOL introduce necessary and at least satisfactorily effective checks and balances, this could prove to be the best possible albeit not ideal, solution to the problem of spamming.
If real spammers will be stopped, then who would use it? Real spammers can get around filters anyway.
I just can not see spammers paying yahoo or aol for this.
Furthermore, one thing I like about yahoo is they have fairly good spam filtering. But, if this idea of yahoo/aol actually works for those companies, then I am not using yahoo email anymore. If everybody abandons their yahoo accounts, then what has yahoo accomplished?
Bad idea, all the way around.
I wish I could get a job as a business executive, so I could make $50M a year for not making a profit, and for comming up with bad ideas.
Well one cant expect a free lunch forever. I still have my hotmail from 96/97 and only use it for signups on sites/forums. Best to have a real email server with anti-spam software and full control over the likes of these guys. They are all sitting there with their millions of clients saying “how can we make money off these users?” and eventually they will figure a way to either make it or scare away the users.
I sell small downloadable software on ebay. Last year my life on ebay suddenly became
more complicated as users of
AOL suddenly stopped getting my mail with
their program files
attached. It wasn’t just me, another
radionics software seller posted
the same problem. There was a sudden
escalation of complaints from
people that were not recieving their files.
Eventually I gleaned that
the new crop of alleged ‘spam blockers’ was
the problem. Since other
ISP’s are able to provide normal services
while blocking spam without
any problems I smelled a rat.
You will notice a sneaky trick in life, when
somebody wants
something, they stage a fake crisis of their
own making, so that the
‘solution’ is for them to get the thing they
wanted in the first
place. I first came across this principle in
Michael Korda’s book
‘Power’, where he advised those seeking job
promotions to stage
problems that they could solve, to look good
to their employers. My
guess regarding the new email problem was
that this was a scam to
extort concessions from other ISP’s before
allowing them normal email
access to their customer base. Now it looks
like this was indeed a
manufactured problem calculated to make a
buck off the solution to a
problem they staged themselves, but not the
way I thought. The idea
was how to charge money for allowing email
access, and the phony
‘spam’ blocker nightmare was the fake
“problem” manufactured to
necessitate their “solution”. I just got this
off osnews.com:
“AOL and Yahoo! are to start charging for
sending emails. Both
companies will still accept free emails but
are offering the chance to
pay to avoid their spam filters. By paying
between a quarter and one
cent per message companies will get
preferential delivery of their
messages. So a “business class” email will go
straight to an AOL-
subscriber’s inbox marked with a stamp saying
“AOL Certified Email”
while a free email will have to run the gamut
of AOL spam filters.
Free mails may also have images and web links
removed.”
So you see “spam blockers” never had anything
to do with protecting
you, they were merely creating a market for a
paid service to get
around them. Again this is real, it’s not one
of those alarmist spoofs
that used to go around.
I am very touchy about people that maintain
control of the herd by
interfering with free and open communication,
whether it’s the church
during the dark ages forbidding people to
read the bible for
themselves, or a computer in a public library
forbidding me to look at
supposedly politically incorrect websites.
This is a very, very bad
thing, and it’s going to get worse before it
gets better. Only time
will tell if the internet becomes the great
equalizer of all men or
their final subjugation. There needs to be a
public outcry against
this “spam blocker” scam. If you had some un-
appointed party reading
your postal mail before deciding whether or
not you “should” recieve
it you would be outraged. How would you feel
if your postal mailman
set himself up in business charging people
money before he would
deliver *YOUR* mail to you? People that
already paid for their stamp
to send it, but now some guy on the recieving
end is refusing to
deliver it unless you pay him a bribe? Or if
he delivered your mail
but first he started going through your mail
and removing photographs
of your grandchildren that your daughter sent
you because she didn’t
pay his bribe regarding content? You already
pay for your internet
access which includes your access to send
email. If I’m already paying
for example Netzero to send my email, will I
now also pay AOL for
agreeing to accept that mail? Tomorrow will I
be paying each ISP that
I expect to accept my emails? will I have to
start telling people
“I’ll send you my reply to your inquiry via
the post office, because
my ISP plan doesn’t include sending email to
your ISP”. If you think
that’s not what’s on the way, you should look
at your *insane* cell
phone plan to see where this email scam is
heading. Or maybe you look
forward to choosing your ISP by how many
‘minutes’ you can send email
to AOL for free on weekends? And look again
at this quote:” So a “business class” email
will go straight to an AOL-
subscriber’s inbox marked with a stamp saying
“AOL Certified Email”
while a free email will have to run the gamut
of AOL spam filters.
Free mails may also have images and web links
removed.”
What goddam GAUL. Can you imagine sending
someone a letter by post, and finding out the
mailman opened up your letter, read it, and
took a razor blade and cut out your P.O. box
address because you did not pay his bribe to
deliver your letter?! See they *know* that if
they start deleting your file attachments
that you will send download links instead, so
their scam takes into account deleting web
links you try to send too.
This is simply and flatly EVIL.
If you had some un-appointed party reading your postal mail before deciding whether or not you “should” recieve it you would be outraged. How would you feel if your postal mailman set himself up in business charging people money before he would deliver *YOUR* mail to you? People that already paid for their stamp to send it, but now some guy on the recieving end is refusing to deliver it unless you pay him a bribe?
But that’s just it. People don’t pay for stamps to send email, so the zero cost of entry makes spamming easy. If I wrote 10 million letters and dumped them unstamped at the post office expecting delivery, I’d just get laughed at. And I don’t really consider placing a stamp on an envelope a bribe to get the mailman to deliver it.
Not that I think pay-only email is a good idea (who’d pay for forum registration emails, etc?), but even if the “real” spammers were willing to pay the cost, I think it’d surely cut down on the amount of spam caused by viruses (because surely Yahoo/AOL isn’t gonna go for “I need to send 1,000,000 messages today, all from different computers using different return addresses which I don’t know yet”).
And if the mailman was willing to sort my bills and my letters from my bulk mail, well….
“..People that already paid for their stamp to send it, but now some guy on the recieving end is refusing to deliver it unless you pay him a bribe? ”
<you> “But that’s just it. People don’t pay for stamps to send email,”
WRONG, you pay for your ISP service, the ability to send email is part of the services you’re paying for, that’s the ‘stamp’ on your mail that you already paid. For some other party on the recieving end to require payment for themselves as well is equivalent to the mailman expecting a bribe before he delivers it. And this business of stripping out web links from your mail unless you pay is equivalent to the mailman snooping through your mail and deciding what he thinks you should be allowed to recieve. This is an astronomical intrusion.
And for the people pitching Gmail, keep dreaming. Send a zip file to somebody’s gmail account and see what happens, gmail will not deliver the mail and will send you a notice about zip being a not-allowed attachment type. Sheer GAUL. Open your eyes people, these guys don’t care about your spam problem, they’re all working toward a day that you will have to pay for each email you send. If you think they will stop with spammers and not go after everybody else after that you are dreaming.
That title sure is flaimbait.
#1 No they’re not going to charge you the free account user for sending emails
#2 This is the same story about companies paying yahoo/aol to skip spam filters
#3 The two-tier iternet is a scary thing, maybe europe should control the internet. No scratch that, maybe finland should control the internet.