I got a political action Email saying that AOL is trying to start some Email tax. I’ve heard little blurbs about this but nothing solid. According to the Email this will allow certain mailers to bypass spam and junk mail blockers. It will also hurt charitqable organizations. I’m confused.
Does anyone have any info on this alledged email tax?
Not a tax. AOL is considering adding a surcharge to e-mail sent by bulk mailers who use AOL for their mailings. The bulk e-mail with the surcharge will have better service. More here.
I think it’s more like a “white list”, that people who pay this fee get to have their emails “whitelisted”, and not sent to the spam filter. This assumes that bulk mailers will not pay the fee, of course, but hey.
I’m not sure if this is such a bad thing. Certainly, it forces you to have more control over your inbox, and manually “whitelist” your friends (I assume you can still do that), and will prevent things like bank phishing emails, because your “real” bank would have whitelisted their email. And really, whether or not you consider charitable organisation emails “spam” depends on your judgement. If you think they aren’t spam, then whitelist them yourselves.
The company I work for currently sends out a newsletter twice a month to people that have signed up at our website. It goes out to around 400k people. We’ve probably got 10k AOL users on the list. A lot of these are people that sign up, never opt-out, then complain about us to the AOL spam cops. So we’ve been banned from sending email to AOL several times by their blacklist software. This new process will have us pay to make sure we’re always white-listed. It looks like it’s going to be 1/4 of a cent per address, per message.
For the average user, you won’t see anything. For us, we’ve got to decide if we want to pay and still email to AOL. Yahoo is looking at doing the same thing.
So that’s a whopping 25 bucks to send this email? Is that a problem for your company?
$25 to AOL then $25 to Yahoo etc. Pus more importantly somone has to manage all those contracts to the big email providers. That sounds pretty much like a show stopper to me.
Our company has started a campaign to inform our AOL customers we may not be able to send them confirmations on orders, email lists they signed up for, and the all important emailing of the tracking numbers.
While we can afford to pay the fee, we will not participate in helping this spread.
*Two of our customers have switched from AOL due to this, not much but thats something.
Yeah. It is. Basically, what AOL is saying here is that spammers are causing them serious problems, so they’re going to charge everybody except the spammers for “preferential treatment.” I, for one, would deeply resent having to pay AOL to send mail to their users.
50 bucks a month, every month, to send it to AOL. Same with yahoo. And if we have more AOL people sign up, we have to adjust the cost. Our list is opt-in. We don’t make people sign up, and lots of times people sign up and don’t go to the bother of taking themselves off the list (we have a link from the email and our webpage to be removed). So they complain to AOL about us instead.
Say we end up with 40k AOL users? Price adjustment. It’s giving us pause, I’m not really sure what the people that run the list are going to do.
Well… not exactly.
Say nobody pays. What happens? Everybody gets sent to the “junk” folder. Then, it is up to the individual to “whitelist” people that they trust.
This is exactly what SHOULD be happening.
People should automatically DISTRUST all mail coming in. But that’s not what they do. They trust all mail unless it is “blacklisted”. This causes problems such as phishing, and spam clogging up your mailbox.
If you “distrust all”, however, then there can never be such things as phishing or spam, because you automatically distrust all mail unless you specifically trust them. What AOL is offering in addition to that is to confer “trusted” status, based on fees paid. The option to “blacklist” is still available, but this is an additional hurdle for spammers and the like to cross, and a monetary one, at that.
The idea is sound, but the price point may not be. If it is too cheap, then spammers and phishers will not be sufficiently deterred. Too expensive, and you overly penalise businesses (I think overhead is more important, but hey).
So, if you look at it from a trust/distrust perspective, it’s not such a bad idea. Of course, if everyone would simply distrust all mail right NOW, then all the problems would be solved, but this would penalise legitimate business, which probably should be on a whitelist, for those dumbasses that don’t understand how to whitelist, and complain to their bank/ebay/whatever that they’re not getting any emails.
How can we seperate the legit business from the spammers? By how much they’re willing to pay, I suppose… after all, your profitmargin per customer email is much higher than the fraction of a cent AOL is asking… but for spammers, the profitmargin per victim email is much lower. They rely on the one in a hundred thousand that is a dunce, and send out millions of emails. In addition, before sending out the email, they do not have any money “up front”. So for the spammers, money to send email is a much riskier thing to do, and also they send far more email per profitable “customer”, because not all persons they send email to will result in a profit.
You must not use email for business. If this happened with me, then either:
(a) I’d have to check every single message in the junk folder (which defeats the purpose)
-or-
(b) I’d lose the vast majority of my book signings, consulting gigs, author appearances, and even a big pile of book sales (from people that email first rather than just buying from the Web site).
Both of those are bad things.
It seems to me like this is the beginning of charging for Email.
A general Email question. I get some junk mail and useing Outlook I can create rules saying send all mails containing X and Y to the junk mail bin.
Don’t spammers send from various computers and change the details to avoid this filter? I keep getting them. What other options are there to designate every mail from a certain source as junk?
Not quite… According to my understanding, for those senders not participating in the program, nothing changes. Their messages will still go through the existing spam controls, checked against blacklists, etc., and delivered to the user’s mailbox if they don’t raise any red flags. Those senders that do enroll in the Goodmail system will simply be able to bypass the spam controls.
BTW, enrollment is not, in theory, open to anyone who ponies up the cash. Goodmail has an accreditation process to ensure applicants are legitimate, non-spamming businesses. Of course, they have a financial incentive to ignore their own guidelines, so we’ll see how well the process works out.
AOL and Yahoo are both partnering with Goodmail, so I would guess that one fee covers both.
Snopes weighs in on the subject.
I think thats wishful thinking and buying into the hype. It’s ony a short step from here to leveraging others into having to pay the fee, and then requiring individuals to pay to “guarentee” their mail gets to where it’s supposed to.
I think people are missing the point here. AOL/Yahoo are not so much concerned about making your life easier as they are about making their lives easier. Of course if this attracts more customers because they are “protected” from spam then so much the better for them.
As of a year ago about 90% of all e-mails were considered spam (cite). For someone like Yahoo who offers anyone a free 1GB of mail space this is a staggering waste of resources on their part. I use a Yahoo account as my spam catcher. Anytime I am ever asked by a merchant or whatever for my e-mail address I give them my Yahoo account address. My home e-mail has been strictly kept for family and friends. As a result I get literally zero spam mails to my home account. My Yahoo account pulls down literally hundreds of spam mails a week. All of it is crap but Yahoo has to pay for disk space to store it all till I get around to deleting it.
Not only is that 90% clogging up AOL and Yahoo servers but it is a real problem for legitimate businesses. This is something I have helped some companies with and it is a never ending battle…occasionally this even results in legitimate e-mails getting blocked. That 90% is also a serious hod of internet bandwidth slowing everything down to some extent.
Of course in the end it is you and I who will pay the charge for e-mail to AOHell. Legitimate e-mailers like some posters to this thread will probably end up paying the surcharge and of course will then roll that into a cost of doing business when pricing their products/services (which means the consumer pays). Still, I think it is a price worth paying as the spam issue is just really over the top obnoxious. As long as it is nearly free (beyond an initial investment in a computer, internet connection and mass mailer software) people have no reason to NOT send you an e-mail peddaling whatever it is they are selling. It also means the few worthwhile messages that may be in there (things a consumer may have opted in to) get lost in the deluge.
Personally I think the price should be higher…at least $0.01/e-mail. If you send out 10,000 e-mails legitimately then it shouldn’t be a problem. If you let your computer run all night spamming hundreds of thousands of e-mails it’ll hurt.
Yes…the war between spammers and things used to stop spammers is ever evolving. Blocking an address is pretty much useless these days except to block your ex from sending you the latest rant on what an ass you are. An actual spammer rotates the send name so fast now that you can never keep up. There is other software that helps filter for spam messages. They will do things like look at the subject line and body text and look for certain known items that might indicate the message is spam (like a name in the send line that is something like "bXeu48UnsGsLL@whatever.com). Now spammers just roatate through a name list it seems so it looks more legit. I have also seen spam that in the body text has four lines of random words at the beginning and end so filters looking for certain buzz words as an overall percentage of text in the mail get thrown off (like “buy” or “viagra”).
The best spam filters I have seen use a combination of inspecting each message based on rules (that are updated) and subscribing to blacklisting services. The inspecting routines score an e-mail to decide how spam-like it is. You can then adjust the threshold of what score must be met to allow the e-mail through. With a bit of tweaking you can seriously cut down on the spam (some always gets through but tighter restrictions then run a serious risk of booting legit e-mail).
No, yours is paranoid thinking with no basis whatsoever.
All this is, is a fee to bypass Yahoo/AOL’s spam filters, on condition that all your mailouts go to people who have opted in. That is, to guarantee that your emails to your customers are not falsely picked up by the spam filters. If you don’t pay the fee they are treated exactly as they are now.
How anyone could characterise this as a tax when it has no connection to government whatsoever is bizarre to me.
Back when AOL was Quantumn Link and the incentive to join was a 300 baud modem, email was indeed not free, I seem to recall that you were allowed up to 10 free emails per month, and anything beyond that was a small sum of money. I got zero spam! Heck even in AOL as AOL’s early days, all of the email was AOL-only; it took a while (and it was a big deal) when they were able to bridge the gap to the internet.
One thing that’s missing from potential schemes is a challenge-response system that was you can still receive unsolicited mail from individuals. Otherwise, whitelists are the way to go. I wish I could whitelist my USPS box.
While my company is having to decide what to do about our mailing list, I think the move actually makes sense. It costs more to receive mail than it does to send mail. Even if it’s just junk that people delete right away, you’ve still got the storage costs to handle the incoming mail until it gets deleted. No matter how well you plan, it’s possible for an amount of incoming mail to overwhelm your storage, then you’ve got downtime. Those of us running corporate email systems have it worse…people connect to AOL email and download it off their servers. Corporate email servers typically keep a copy on the server, even after it’s been read. And if someone just deletes it and doesn’t clean out their deleted items, you still have a copy of it stored on the server.
If this slows down the flow of spam, so much the better. It’s not a tax, and calling it that is paranoid. We don’t charge people to send us email because we want to receive it. But if we could, it would slow down spam very quickly. You don’t pay us to get the email? We don’t receive emails from you.
In practical terms, then, this is what you’re advocating: When first opening the mail, we look in the Trash folder first instead of looking in the Inbox first. Under this system, we can take the Inbox for granted, but the Trash will need daily monitoring, to make sure no one who is wanted will get trashed. Now it’s the reverse: the Trash takes care of itself (although there are some infrequent false positives, so we still have to check there). It’s the Inbox that needs daily monitoring to zap the spam and fraud.
The present system runs the risk of bad stuff getting in. Tabby_Cat’s method runs the risk of good stuff being kept out.
If the birthday greeting from Auntie Em is blocked from your Inbox by mistake, you’ll survive. But if a destructive virus gets in, maybe kiss your $1000 machine, and all its files, goodbye. Maybe you’re onto something there. Better 1000 guilty people go free than one innocent person be put to death. Maybe the more destructive risk carries the greater weight in making choices.