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America Online Spam The Almighty Buck

AOL to Charge Senders for Incoming Email 462

Posted by CowboyNeal 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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AOL to Charge Senders for Incoming Email More

AOL to Charge Senders for Incoming Email

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  • Whoa. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02, 2006 @11:13PM (#14632163)
    This is going against the reason that junk mail folders are there... Basically the junk mail folder will become just another spam-infested inbox.

  • I wish I could... (Score:5, Funny)

    by ufoman ( 544261 ) <ufoman@nospam.gmail.com> on Thursday February 02, 2006 @11:13PM (#14632166) Homepage
    I wish I could charge AOL for sending me all those AOL CD's I get in the mail.
  • ...At least, that's what all their contacts are going to say when AOL tries to charge them for the "privilage" of contacting them. On the bright side, this ought to drive even more AOL'ers to other services, though!
    • No kidding. Actually this sounds like it'll just drive the divide between net users with good and bad taste even wider apart.

      Seriously, how many computer-savvy folk will give a blithering fuck about not being able to send mail to some cheesedick who refuses to switch from AOL to something reasonable?

      Actually, if they try this, it'll probably stick for a week, *maybe*, before their servers get slammed with hatemail and boycotts. That, any every businessman who has an AOL account will switch to something else

    • Re:Well, fuck AOL subscribers, then! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Guppy06 ( 410832 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @01:15AM (#14632766)
      This is a good thing? I'd rather keep all people who would use AOL in one, easy-to-block domain!

  • Obvious Question but it needs to be asked... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bryansix ( 761547 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @11:14PM (#14632172) Homepage
    Why does anyone use AOL anymore?

  • This reminds me... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by garrett714 ( 841216 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @11:15PM (#14632175)
    ...of when I was doing tech support for a DSL provider, and we had people that called that still used AOL alongside DSL. When informed that they didn't need to AOL software to access the internet anymore, they responded "We want to keep our AOL email address for our business."

    That made me laugh.

  • well... (Score:5, Funny)

    by awing0 ( 545366 ) <adam AT badtech DOT org> on Thursday February 02, 2006 @11:15PM (#14632178) Homepage
    I never knew talking to AOL members was a privilege worth paying for.

  • Good thing its _A_OL (Score:5, Informative)

    by Christopher_G_Lewis ( 260977 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @11:15PM (#14632179) Homepage
    Reading their Sender Qualifications indicates you European emailers are pretty much screwed:

    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)

    by MustardMan ( 52102 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @11:17PM (#14632197)
    The headline makes it sound like AOL will be charging all senders a fee to deliver mail to AOL customers. TFA seems to say that the charge is only to be certified to send high volume email, like mailing lists or legit bulk mail (ie spam from somewhat reputable companies). Another /. headline making a mountain out of a molehill. You'd think with the way people used to bitch about MS FUD around here all the time, this stuff would be a bit less common.
    • TFA seems to say that the charge is only to be certified to send high volume email, like mailing lists or legit bulk mail (ie spam from somewhat reputable companies).

      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?
      • That doesn't strike you as a bad thing?

        Nope, it doesn't. There are lots of technologies that allow you to deliver content to users automatically. You need look no further than yahoo groups as an example - users can send an email to the group and it will be posted to the group website. Those who so choose can set the group to email them, and others can check it through the website.

        There are other technologies that can allow people to automatically get updates without using email - like rss. Spam is a rid
      • Another thing - these emails will simply be put in the junk folder. If your mailing list is THAT important to you, I bet adding the address to your contacts will automagically whitelist it for you and keep it out of the junk folder.

    • Re:Another misleading headline... big shocker (Score:5, Interesting)

      by thrillseeker ( 518224 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @11:42PM (#14632330)
      TFA seems to say that the charge is only to be certified to send high volume email, like mailing lists or legit bulk mail (ie spam from somewhat reputable companies). Another /. headline making a mountain out of a molehill.

      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.

      • Agreed.

        I suppose you could always try the alternative tactic of charging each AOL customer a fee based on your transaction costs plus the overhead to track the costs for each email delivered to AOl in addition to each email send from AOL

        But it just occurred to me. AOL won't care. They push BLOGS not LISTS. If everything is on blogs for discussions then there isn't much else to do. That and there's the added plus for AOL in that they can more readily manage your content to make sure you comply with the

    • TFA seems to say that the charge is only to be certified to send high volume email, like mailing lists or legit bulk mail (ie spam from somewhat reputable companies)

      No, it doesn't sound like it required reputable companies to sign up. Merely those who are willing to pay a fee to avoid spam detectors in order to spam people. There's no legit spam, no matter how what your congress-critters who have sold you out say.
      • There's no legit spam

        Sure there is. Some people like knowing what sales are going on at their favorite stores. Some people (gasp) even buy newspapers specifically for all the sale circulars inside. Just because YOU think spam is the root of all evil doesn't mean all people do. There are an awful lot of opt-in commercial mailing lists that people are interested in. One of the requirements to be accepted by AOL's new system is an EASY OPT-OUT.

  • uhh (Score:5, Insightful)

    by akhomerun ( 893103 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @11:17PM (#14632202)
    isn't this in a sense like selling out your own subscribers.

    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)

    by jmorris42 ( 1458 ) * <{jmorris} {at} {beau.org}> on Thursday February 02, 2006 @11:18PM (#14632204)
    This won't be a problem. Just means more gmail accounts. Seriously, someone sent me an invite over a year ago, I created an account and don't use it much yet. But it has had ZERO spams which is more than I can say for my Yahoo! account that gets em and all I use it for is system testing.

    AOL is dying anyway, which is why they no longer have the resources to fight spam and are instead outsourcing it.
    • "I created an account and don't use it much yet. But it has had ZERO spams"

      You have zero spam because you haven't used it and because the bots haven't generated your email address yet. I'm guessing your gmail address isn't john@gmail.com or janice@gmail.com. Gmail isn't immune to spam, it just catches more and throws it in your junk mail folder more efficiently with less false-positives. In the past week, I have received mail from Irene Leila (She wants to fuck me apparently), Saundra Gore (She wants
      • > You have zero spam because you haven't used it and because the bots haven't generated your
        > email address yet.

        But I use both as just test addresses for troubleshooting mail delivery problems and just to have an address offsite. The point was Yahoo! started getting spam so fast I'd swear they were selling the addresses themselves like the postal service. Gmail is still at zero. And I'm not all that creative, I tend towards the same LHS.

      •     I forward a copy of all my mail to GMail. Their spam filtering works pretty well.

            On the other hand, the mail that lands in my local box is filtered just as well, using MailScanner with SpamAssassin.

           
  • Okay, first reading it I thought that AOL actually had the audacity to charge maillist senders per email so that the email wouldn't get junked. But reading the article, it seems they are talking about enabling links and images when viewing an email (which a user can do manually). But still, the idea that they would do this (An Email Tarrif almost) is ridiculous. All under the guise of "protecting users from spam". Puh-lease.

  • Who cares? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Rick Zeman ( 15628 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @11:22PM (#14632231)
    Bulk emailers on one hand and AOLers on the other? Let them have each other.
  • Is it just me, or does there seem to be an increase in terribly misleading headlines on /. lately? AOL isn't charging for all incoming mail, they're charging commercial emailers to send email to AOL users. As far as I can tell, AOL is a dying breed whose users won't really notice the difference, and are probably used to service problems anyway.

  • Misleading article subject line... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mh101 ( 620659 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @11:24PM (#14632244)
    I just read the article, and I don't think the title of this posting should be "AOL to charge senders for incoming mail" but "AOL to charge senders to ensure email don't get flagged as spam."

    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)

      by Samrobb ( 12731 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @02:42AM (#14633074) Journal
      I just read the article, and I don't think the title of this posting should be "AOL to charge senders for incoming mail" but "AOL to charge senders to ensure email don't get flagged as spam."

      <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>

  • now mail, what will they drop next? The Web? Bah, all overrated anyway.
  • AOLers: Just get a gmail account, and a better ISP.

  • Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Wapiti-eater ( 759089 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @11:38PM (#14632312)
    All I can do is block any and all AOL origionated connections from any I-net resource I have influence over. That's now done - and should've been done long ago. AOL is a product unto itself. The internet is something all together different.

    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.
  • I read TFA. (OK, I read the first 1/3 and skimmed the rest.) I never saw a mention of money. How much is this going to cost? And it seems like it's just talking about large volume senders, not people who send a few at a time. Is that what you got too?
  • In other news, the rest of the Internet has started charging AOL for every SPAM email that appears to come from an @aol.com address, as well as for every spread of a virus from an unpatched AOL customer, allowed to browse the web without a parent nearby.
  • Sorry to the younger slashdotters here but I've also got a song from the Doors in my head with the line "This is the end, my friend the end," Sorry but at this point in time I'm willing to put money on the Vegas odds that the internet will no longer be a viable business or personal tool by 2008.

    I'm also will to bet that the only ones willing to pay the certification fee will be spammers. Others don't have enough volume to justify it.

  • Going at the bottom of all my ads: "Since AOL has seen fit to *leave* the email system you will have to use a valid email system to reach me and the vast majority of the internet. Sucks to be you."

  • This makes me laugh, and that's not the half of it (Score:3, Interesting)

    by scronline ( 829910 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @11:52PM (#14632375) Homepage
    Ok, first off, every AOL customer I talk to, basically we take away. For several reasons.

    1) things work without all the advertising from US (can't control other sites, but WE aren't hammering them.

    2) We're cheaper

    3) We have better spam and virus filters

    4) We actually CARE about what our customers want

    5) We don't provide worthless tools and pass them off as keeping you safe (this counts against "others" also)

    Perfect example of the last one. I have a system on my bench right now. It was purchased 4 months ago with "AOL protection already installed and setup. Today I found 10 viruses, and about 349 spy/adware items on the system (per adaware scan). Due to the huge amount of CRAP on the system, I may be forced to reload it due to the huge amount of damage done to the system. It could probably be cleaned up, but laborwise....cheaper to backup and reload.

    This isn't the first time either. My shop averages about 3 a week that come in for malware problems that have AOL, SBC, Earthlink, or "others" installed that simply aren't doing their jobs. These are ISP related tools that aren't working. I'm not counting the stuff like spybot or whatever that is purchased that isn't doing it's job either.

    Little things like THIS is only going to tick AOL users off more when they can't get their mailing lists anymore. I have about 200 customers running mailing lists and they are all small and free mailing lists. One of them is a quilting list for pete's sake with like 50 people on it, and 35 of them are on AOL. I expect to see quite a few new customers when AOL pulls this....I'm counting the days.

  • Bullshit (Score:2, Interesting)

    by imag0 ( 605684 )
    ...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...

    Seriously guys, I have a spammer in my datacenter that uses Ironports to send email out across AOL, MSN and other large networks due to agreements allowing commercial email sent from those devices to be automatically whitelisted.

    So, spammers get to buy some boxes and get around (ahem) *spam blocki
  • 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.

    This policy seems really stupid to me. My buddy who doesn't pay AOL to get his email address recognized will have his email sent to my trash bin, but then some spammer who is profitable enough

  • Bah. Doesn't anyone here know how AOL Mail works!? (Score:5, Informative)

    by kiddailey ( 165202 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @12:08AM (#14632471) Homepage
    Judging from the rash of response, I can see that a good portion of people here either do not have AOL accounts or do not know how HTML mail works in AOL.

    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)

    by RyoShin ( 610051 ) <tukaro.gmail@com> on Friday February 03, 2006 @12:18AM (#14632529) Homepage Journal
    It's been long postulated on Slashdot, by a multitude of posters, that an effective way to remove spam is by setting up a payment system. The key is to make it easy on those who mail casually, while hurting the spammers.

    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)

    by LodCrappo ( 705968 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @12:35AM (#14632609)
    Email is not free. We all pay for it when we pay our ISPs. I for one do not want to keep sharing the cost of the spam that all the other poor saps using my isp get every day. I would rather that the people using and benefiting from my ISP's resources paid for them. The first step is to charge the people who actually use up the most of my ISPs resources, and one large consumer is the senders of UCE which contains images. Hmmm.. thats the same exact group that AOL has decided to start charging for access... coincidence? I think it's a great step in the right direction, and I hope more big email providers follow suit.

    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.

  • Stopping email isn't the goal of Goodmail (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SeattleDave ( 236077 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @01:16AM (#14632771)
    I'm not a big fan of this model. Still, it could help some people. Folks have complained that it won't stop companies like MSFT, The Gap, etc., from mailing because they'll have no problem paying for it. However... that's not the purpose of Goodmail. It's to make it so the dredge can't get in and make it so that if you do tell the sender to stop emailing you, after their email has nicely arrived in your inbox, your response will get processed and you'll stop getting their email. With the spammers there's no real or legally binding way to do that. With this model the senders will be easily and accurately identified and the processed of opting out structured and adhered to.

  • The whitelist (Score:3, Interesting)

    by lupid ( 880820 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @02:02AM (#14632946)
    Anyone who isn't on the whitelist will probably not be affected by this. Most servers are not on the whitelist. Getting on it is about as easy as getting Dell or Netgear tech support to send you replacement gold bars in the mail.

    The people this will really affect have servers that simply forward mail. We host commerce sites for people who don't know anything about the internet or what to do with it. They receive mail at their domains, and then we forward it to their AOL accounts, which they actually know how to check. We need to be whitelisted because if we aren't, we get blocked for forwarding any spam that our clients get at their domain accounts.

    The users control what is marked spam, so it's not reasonable to expect them to understand when you tell them repeatedly not to mark messages as junk any goddamn more please.

    Another note: a few months ago, AOL spontaneously started bouncing mails that had UNCLICKABLE URLs in them. So if you typed a URL in plain text, you got bounced. Real funny, I swear.

    Oh, and I'm trademarking "Greenlisting"

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @12:16PM (#14635346)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

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