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AOL to Charge Senders for Incoming Email
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Thu Feb 02, 2006 10:11 PM
from the virtual-postage dept.
from the virtual-postage dept.
pdclarry writes "AOL announced on January 30 that it will phase out its Enhanced Whitelist service in June in favour of Goodmail CertifiedEmail, which carries an as yet unspecified per-message fee. Until now, a mailing list gets on the AOL whitelist by following good e-mail practices, such as cleaning up dead addresses, making it easy for people to leave mailing lists, and of course not sending any spam. This is all going to be thrown out the window and replaced with the payment of hard currency to Goodmail. People who can afford to pay this fee will have the privilege of reaching AOL subscribers, others will end up in junk folders. Yahoo is expected to follow down the same path."
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Whoa. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Whoa. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
I wish I could... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I wish I could... (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, they're already paying for that, to the USPS.
Parent
Re:I wish I could... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:I wish I could... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:I wish I could... (Score:5, Funny)
You could always put them back in the mail box marker "Return to Sender" and make them pay for the postage again.
Parent
Re:I wish I could... (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe they'll both learn then!
Parent
Re:I wish I could... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's basically a PO-box where you can send mail to without postage, as the recipient pays for the mail.
There have been numerous projects here to collect those cd's, and mailing them back to AOL/Compuserve using their 'antwoordnummer' - Thereby making them pay (by weight) for receiving them back
There have been variations on the theme, eg first shredding the cd's so they can't send them out again; or as token of appreciation, sending them a complimentary brick included in the package (saving them the trouble of replacing the windows where the brick would otherwise have been thrown through
Parent
Obvious Question but it needs to be asked... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Obvious Question but it needs to be asked... (Score:5, Funny)
They use it because they're middle-aged housewives who learned to use it 10 years ago and are threatened by change.
...at least, that describes the only person I know who still uses it.
Parent
Re:Obvious Question but it needs to be asked... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Obvious Question but it needs to be asked... (Score:5, Funny)
Have you ever tried to cancel an AOL account?
Parent
Re:Obvious Question but it needs to be asked... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Obvious Question but it needs to be asked... (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, we use those as craft supplies. You let the kids glue them shiny-side-out to things. It doesn't much matter what things you let kids glue them to; kids just like to glue stuff, and CDs are shiny, so as long as you don't do it too often (more than, say, once a year with any given group of kids), they have a blast gluing AOL CDs to practically anything. For instance, if you have accumulated only enough AOL CDs for two per kid, you let them glue the CDs back-to-back and run a ribbon through the hole, and it's a Christmas tree ornament. (Yes, this is incredibly lame, but a typical six-year-old thinks it's the best fun he's ever had.)
Parent
Re:Obvious Question but it needs to be asked... (Score:5, Informative)
I was amazed at this, but now, perhaps it make sense: AOL is monetizing all those long-standing email addresses!
Parent
Re:Obvious Question but it needs to be asked... (Score:4, Funny)
I found the best way was to cancel my bank account, change my name and move to a foreign country. They've tracked me down twice but I filed off my fingerprints this time and had plastic surgery so I'm hopeful. They only ones worse are Girl Scouts at cookie time and Jehova's Witnesses. Those I've had to learn to live with.
Parent
Re:Obvious Question but it needs to be asked... (Score:4, Funny)
I once argued with some JWs who arrived on my doorstep. I argued evolution until they looked at their watches. Then when they tried to leave, I brought up another issue and argued some more ... and more ... and more....
They never came back. Pity, I was just getting started.
Parent
This reminds me... (Score:5, Insightful)
That made me laugh.
well... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:well... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:well... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Good thing its _A_OL (Score:5, Informative)
Accreditation Criteria
In order to meet the strict qualifying criteria, an organization must, among other things:
- have at least 1 year of business history, as verified by a commercial identity verification service
- ***have business headquarters located in the United States or Canada ***
etc...
Another misleading headline... big shocker (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Another misleading headline... big shocker (Score:3, Insightful)
So if I sign up for a mailing list operated by a not-for-profit support group for, let's say, Parkinson's Disease -- and that mailing list has thousands of members -- the not-for-profit support group has to pay?
That doesn't strike you as a bad thing?
Re:Another misleading headline... big shocker (Score:5, Interesting)
Those of us who manage free high-volume mailing lists will be removing aol addresses from those lists - we'll see if your statement that it's only slashdot making a mountain out of a molehill becomes truth.
Parent
Email lists are useful and good (Score:5, Insightful)
E-mail lists work in a way that blogs and "yahoo groups" and stuff can't. Let's say I want to receive a newsletter that's sent whenever there's news. Once a week on average, sometimes more, sometimes less. I don't want to have to remember to check a web page all the time to see if there's news. I don't want to check it once weekly and find that they updated on an irregular day earlier in the week for a breaking announcement that I missed. I want that content to be pushed to me so I can read it if it's there as I take my afternoon tea, along with all the other news I read in that way.
You can go and reinvent the wheel, come up with another way to push content onto your users. If it gets popular enough it will be spammed. And yet there will still be a need to push content. Or maybe you could try something like RSS, if you wanted to install and set up a server that would be hit up every hour by whatever fraction of your users decided to even try "that newfangled RSS thing". Newsgroups are designed for just this purpose, but they of course have their own spam problems and many users don't know how to use them.
Or maybe AOL should just drop their arrogance, admit that spam is a difficult problem for which they have no better answer than anyone else, and start behaving with a level of responsibility corresponding to the effect they have on the Internet community.
Parent
welcome to Gmail! (Score:5, Insightful)
uhh (Score:5, Insightful)
i.e. they don't like that the spammers are spamming, but if they are willing to pay them, then they really don't care?
that's why even free mail services beat out AOL (especially GMail) because they just try to filter out everything as spam.
If you're going to pay double the price of other dial up companies, shouldn't you get spam-less email? How can Netzero/Netscape ISP/PeoplePC afford to take in $10 a month and somehow paying $23 for AOL means not even getting the most basic of spam filters. $23 is approaching low-speed DSL rates.
Won't be a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
AOL is dying anyway, which is why they no longer have the resources to fight spam and are instead outsourcing it.
Who cares? (Score:4, Funny)
Misleading article subject line... (Score:4, Insightful)
From the looks of it, I could still send an email to a friend with an AOL address and not get charged for it. However... any any images linked to would be blocked, and links within the email would be 'non-clickable' unless you sign up for AOL's program. And the poster makes it sound like it's an expensive deal - the article mentions several times that the fee is "a fraction of a cent per email." Doesn't mention whether or not there's a hefty signup fee or not...
Re:Misleading article subject line... (Score:4, Funny)
<voice style='Godfather'>
"That's a classy email you have there. Real nice, you know? It would be a... shame... if anything were to happen to it."
</voice>
Parent
Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
The I-net is dividing into two classes. Those that use it and those that're used by it. I refuse to further facilitate and/or enable the continued abuse of the 'not yet educated'. Instead I vow to support, educate and lead 'n00bs' into effective and responsable participation and membership in this world wide community.
Yea, even if it's *just* helping my neighbor get Firefox installed - every bit helps. Hell, at least I got him OFF of AOL and onto a local ISP that provides a real I-net experience (FF was just the begining). The Internet is not a shopping mall packaged and pablum loaded empty calory gorging of other's sweet waste. That's AOL - an empty, but well packaged product leeching off of the reality and efforts of the Internet and it's citizens - and making a mockery (and profit) of it.
Spam needs to be faught, but like so many social ills, it's a symptom of a larger, not an intrinsic 'evil' in itself. The problem is blatant comercialisation. The same economic drive that's turned television into a mindless, soal robbing robotic eye into a two dimensional fantasy.
But this stupid and greedy decisioin on AOL's part is an attempt to grasp and retain power over the infrastructure. By sheer mass, an attempt to turn a profit over what many consider a basic human communication. Mmm, maybe we need an Open Internet....
Anyone who buys into the idea that this is some kind of alturistic manouver for the good of all needs to return their Willy Wanka bars. The freak'n elevator was a special effect and you ain't gonna see no Munchkins - no matter what the wrappers say.
Bah. Doesn't anyone here know how AOL Mail works!? (Score:5, Informative)
Currently, if you receive a HTML e-mail in the AOL client, any links or images in the message are not displayed. Instead, only the text of the e-mail is displayed, and a "button" at the top of the message window allows the user to turn on images and links in the message.
What AOL is clearly implementing is a way for "validated" third-parties to pay to have their HTML e-mails sent to AOL users with images and links turned on without requiring the user to take action to see them.
That's it. Nothing more to see here. Please move along.
The beginning of the end of spam? (Score:5, Interesting)
The idea is that you send an e-mail, pay a penny. Or even a quarter of a cent. If you receive an e-mail, you would ideally get the entire amount that the sender paid. But, because of how businesses are, you'll likely get 70% of that. Ideally, most users would only have to pop in $5 a month.
Regardless, this system would make it much harder on spammers. While a user may spend a quarter a week to send e-mails, spammers would be paying tens of thousands of dollars so they can send millions of e-mails. People will actually want to receive spam- the money they receive will more then make up for the mail they send.
One of two things would happen. Either the spammers, suddenly not making nearly the profit before, would drop out, or people would quiet down about the spammer problem, since it would not only pay for their own e-mail, but earn them a small profit (in fact, people getting mail accounts just to receive spam and earn a few bucks a week could become a problem.)
Obviously, there would be some problems initially. Opt-in corporate mailing lists, regular mailing lists, notifications, etc. However, with some brainstorming, I'm sure a good plan could be made, removing one of the major hastles of the internet.
And then all that would be left is Internet Explorer. (And the neocons can entertain themselves with shutting down porn, haha.)
This could be a good thing (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, I'd just like to say that most of the comments I've read seem to want to crap on this idea just because it comes from AOL, with no valid arguments, just some cute joke. If you ever deal with AOL on a professional level, you'll realize that they actually are a pretty smart group of folks. Sure, they do some annoying things and bring a lot of people onto the internet that maybe shouldn't be there, certainly people who wouldn't be there otherwise. But they aren't stupid, they do understand quite a bit about how the internet works, and I think it is possible for them to have a good idea every now and then.
Rejecting aol.com email addresses... (Score:4, Insightful)
I run a board myself, and I'm now going to have to go through my list of users coming from aol.com (hopefully none or not many) and send out a warning that they will need to change to a different email account associated with their userid before June.
And... I would have to update the board code to show an error message to new users trying to register with aol.com email addresses.
Blecch. Why does AOL have to do this? It's like they want to throw up a Great Wall of China between themselves and the rest of the Internet.
Re:Dupe. (Score:3, Informative)
The SENDER pays for the "privelege" of sending mail to AOL.
Re:Dupe. (Score:5, Informative)
You don't need to be on the whitelist to send personal emails today, so you won't need to pay to send email tomorrow.
This only affects senders of bulk emails (mailing lists and spammers).
Parent
Re:Dupe. (Score:4, Insightful)
No this affects mailing lists, not spammers.
If they want to block spam they can use filters. Spam these days tends to come from millions of zombie windows boxes - they'll continue to send small volumes of mail to AOL from forged email addresses and be completely unaffected by this.
Large companies will pay because, presumably, the cost will be less than their average profit per email.
The folk who will be left in the cold will be those that host free mailing lists - that could be your local church, local voluntary associations, schools, folk who freely manage topical lists of interest etc. These folk won't make back the money because email isn't a revenue stream. They're the only ones who will see any effect.
Parent
Since no one here seems to have RTFA... (Score:4, Informative)
First of all, the emails not on this whitelist are not blocked, they merely have any images or links hidden (and while I am not an AO(hel)L user so I cannot know for sure, I'm guessing there is a way for the user to enable them once they have verified that they do indeed want this particular email). Thats the way they currently have it set up, only now it requries senders to go through a lengthy certification process which they have determined is even harder to go through and less effective.
So no, it will not kill of small free mailing lists.
Parent
Re:Dupe. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Dupe. (Score:5, Insightful)
Tends to be a drag when you're running a legitimate mailing list and somebody can't be bothered to look at the procedure for getting unsubscribed ... and suddenly emails to everybody at his ISP start bouncing, and the people who aren't getting their mails think it's because YOU screwed something up.
It also happens when somebody explicitly sets up a ~/.forward on your system (on their account) to forward all their mail somewhere else. Which seems reasonable, but then they go reporting spams received wherever they read their mail, and that system decides that `oho! This site must be an open relay! Look at the Received: headers!' and submits you to a RBL without even bothering to try and forward a spam through your system.
There's lots of knee-jerk reactions going on out there in the name of `fighting spam'. Perhaps they're the right thing to do most of the time, but not all the time. And trying to convince somebody that they made a mistake? Fergetabout ...
Parent
Re:Dupe. (Score:3)
Why would someone want to be an AOL customer again?
Re:What do they consider "bulk"? (Score:3, Interesting)
(I'm not kidding: I've had this runaround with them when an AOL user clicked "this is spam" on a personalized mail with pictures of a wedding... 1 piece of mail if it generates a complaint, is not only spam, it's "bulk".)
Re:What do they consider "bulk"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, opt-in lists are bulk. I had to jump through lots of hoops to get onto AOL's whitelist program just so that people who sign up to my web sites can get their confirmation email.
Once I got on it, it was fine (unlike Hotmail, which randomly drops emails on the floor, to the chagrin of my customers). We get a surprising number of AOL users who mistake the "this is spam" button for the "delete" button, but apparently not in large enough quantities to get us de-listed.
Parent
Re:I hope there's a patent... (Score:5, Funny)
( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
(x) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
(x) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a fascist for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Parent
Re:I hope there's a patent... (Score:5, Insightful)
> emails without feeling the pinch.
And so that noncommercial mailing lists cannot exist at all.
Parent
Re:Well, fuck AOL subscribers, then! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent