AOL and Yahoo to Offer Filter Circumvention 264
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."
And the seal will look like... (Score:4, Interesting)
In exchange for paying AOL/Yahoo, e-mail senders will be guaranteed their messages won't be filtered by AOL/Yahoo, and will bear a seal marked BAYES_90,HTML_AOL_SEAL,HTML_YAHOO_SEAL.
(The mailserver said she'd borne a seal. I said filter the damn spam and leave my wife's private life out of it, OK, pal?)
Re:How does this prevent spam? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe they should do it auction style like Google with the profits split between the users and the companies. Let the advertisers set the most they're willing to spend per message and users set the least they're willing to make per spam message they get.
I'd maybe go for that. Anyone willing to give me $1 a message to read their ad I'll be willing to see what they have to say.
Re:How does this prevent spam? (Score:2, Interesting)
This also gets rid of some of the crappier ads, as the marketer is going to pass the $10,000 fee on to the advertiser. Suddenly, not just anybody can drop $500 for an ad targeted at a few million people.
Re:And who would pay this? (Score:1, Interesting)
We already pay a company for something similar to what AOL & Yahoo are going to do... http://www.habeas.com/ [habeas.com]. Now, we don't pay per-email, but we do pay per server, and quite a bit.
New spam identifier (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:How does this prevent spam? (Score:3, Interesting)
It'd be nice to flip the spam problem on it's ear though where it was the spammer that had to be careful of who they were spamming. Let them be careful and send out messages to smaller more targeted groups.
Google, with GMail's collection of information about the owners of the accounts would be good at targeting those messages.
slashdot morons (Score:5, Interesting)
Disclosure: I have consulted for Goodmail Systems' qmail implementation to be used by Yahoo.
-russ
Filter tightening measure (Score:4, Interesting)
Goodmail Systems doesn't want to see its business destroyed, so it will keep very close track of whose emails generate complaints. If they get too many complaints, they will refuse to sign further messages from that company.
Disclaimer: I have consulted for Goodmail Systems' qmail implementation, and they paid me money for my software. They didn't pay me to tell the truth about what they're doing. That I'm doing because I'm a Quaker.
-russ
Re:How does this prevent spam? (Score:3, Interesting)
good thing i'm using gmail - it detects faked sender emails, and labels it as spam
actually, gmail is doing alot more to protect me from these phishers than paypal itself - the only response i get from paypal when submiting phishing report is automated reply message.
Re:How does this prevent spam? (Score:3, Interesting)
Bingo! That is the extortion scheme in a nutshell. Dial up the sensitivity of the spam filter to create a need for the new service. Keep dialing it up very slowly until you reach a critical mass of paying customers. Then, drop the hammer on the rest. Nothing gets through unless you pay.
The end result might be slightly better than what it is now, although I doubt I'll notice. Another thing I'll hardly notice is those companies passing along the cost to us by increasing the price of their services, but it'll be there.
Legitimate what? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's just like ATM fees... (Score:2, Interesting)
Does spam become legitimate just because its paid? (Score:1, Interesting)
What they are doing, in fact, is to create a new class of messages. Paid spam. Companies may figure out that it's better for them to pay a handful thousand bucks for the assurance that they message will be delivered. But there are a number of problems with the entire idea, and I don't even know where to start.
Just to start, one problem. Anti spam filtering is not perfect, and false positives are a fact of life, that we accept because we know that filtering spam is hard. But, the very moment I start receiving "authorized" spam -- spam that I myself did not authorize, but that my ISP decided to forward to me because HE was being paid for it -- I'm probably going to ask, do I deserve indemnification for false positives?
But there's worse. Unsolicited messages are unsolicited messages, period. Paying the ISP to deliver such messages does not make them solicited or legitimate. There's also the risk that, by accepting to forward unsolicited messages in exchange for money, the ISPs may become liable under anti-spam laws. They may claim that they are only carriers, but I fear that the borders start to become fuzzy. In general, most people don't mind spam filtering and anti-virus scanning, because that's something done to OUR benefit, as customers. This is not the case with the "paid spam". I sincerely don't know if such ISPs would still be regarded as common carriers if they decide to discriminate messages this way. I may turn out to be a bad idea in the end.
And vice-versa? (Score:2, Interesting)
All this is going to do is ensure that personal emails receive less priority than commercial emails. That's the opposite of what most people want. Anyone with an AOL or Yahoo address should probably get a GMail one, instead, now.
Re:slashdot morons (Score:1, Interesting)
Funny coincidence: The Captcha word Slashdot's asking me for before I submit this is "degrade". Which is exactly what's going to happen to those two's email services.....
Re:slashdot morons (Score:1, Interesting)
Previously, our solution was to be whitelisted, (where they notify you any time a message comes through that would have been flagged as spam) which helped us respond much more quickly to the problem and eliminate a lot of spam as soon as it started coming through. But since AOL plans to stop offering whitelisting in favor of this payment method, that means we'd have to pay for each email we send to AOL. Even for an ISP as small as mine, we send out at over 800 mails a day to AOL users. So now I have to pay $8 per day for the priviledge of sending mail to regular users on a one on one basis?? Then yahoo will do it, then hotmail, etc.
Also, they'll probably ratchet up their spam detection routines to be more sensitive, just to make sure they'll catch all little guys. So we'll all have to pay THEM money to compete with them. They'll enter into free agreements with eachother, to make sure their own mail isn't blocked.
So, tell me, how does this do anything except screw small business owners, and provide spammers something new to figure out how to get around?