AOL and Yahoo to Offer Filter Circumvention

tiltowait wrote to mention a report on MSNBC's site stating that AOL and Yahoo are both planning to introduce a for-pay way to circumvent their spam filters. From the article: "The fees, which would range from 1/4 cent to 1 cent per e-mail, are the latest attempts by the companies to weed out unsolicited ads, commonly called spam, and identity-theft scams. In exchange for paying, e-mail senders will be guaranteed their messages won't be filtered and will bear a seal alerting recipients they're legitimate."

most reliable spam filter ever:

[wpegden]

trash "certified" email.

Thanks for the helpful definition

[Anonymous Coward]

The fees ... are the latest attempts by the companies to weed out unsolicited ads, commonly called spam

Thanks, I hadn't hear of spam before. These kids have such groovy slang today!

Da' Mafia!

[DoofusOfDeath]

Say, dat's a nice email message you got there. It would be a shame if some spam filter caught it. ;)

Yeah, like 1/4cent is a lot to a Nigerian Prince!

[The_REAL_DZA]

He probably spends more than that in a day on hotdogs and beer!

The Latest Greatest Spyware

[danielDamage]

...will turn your computer into a zombie mail relay, but also use keyloggers to steal your credit card number to automatically pay AOL the spam fee.

Re:erm

[baadger]

Their drones are oblivious to normal conversation... you have to plant some bait.

[e-mail]
[e-mail]
[e-mail]
[e-mail]

There, now they'll hear him...oh... damn thats bad.

Re:And who would pay this?

[Thud457]

I can't forsee any problems with this half-baked moneygrubbing scheme.

"But AOL certified that that email from the widow of the Nigerian President was real! Now all my financial base are belong to them. :-( "

Re:A slippery slope to a full-blown racket?

[deblau]

Let's find out:

-----

Your post advocates a

( ) 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
( ) 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
( ) 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
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) 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
( ) 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?
( ) 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
( ) 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 stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

So close...but not quite...[OT]

[Anonymous Coward]

Three words: Pre-paid credit card. Four words: Overseas credit card account. Three more words: Stolen credit card.

Pre-paid credit card
Or overseas credit card
Stolen credit card

There--that's better--haiku!

Re:So close...but not quite...[OT]

[Reaperducer]

I like the 404 Haiku [londonarchitecture.co.uk] as well.