Liberty's Blog: Email Stamps.

Sunday, February 05, 2006

Email Stamps.

Spam, it floods mail boxes everywhere. The spammers buy lists, and scrape them off websites, usenet and even mailists. An AOL employee was even caught selling a list to spammers several months ago. Now AOL and Yahoo! have a grand plan to charge some spammers for the priveledge of sending priority mail that bypass the gauntlet of filters and spamtraps.

America Online and Yahoo, two of the world's largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered. The senders must promise to contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages, or risk being blocked entirely.
The Internet companies say that this will help them identify legitimate mail and cut down on junk e-mail, identity-theft scams and other scourges that plague users of their services. Thy also stand to earn millions of dollars a year from the system if it is widely adopted.
AOL and Yahoo will still accept e-mail from senders who have not paid, but the paid messages will be given special treatment. On AOL, for example, they will go straight to users' main mailboxes, and will not have to pass the gantlet of spam filters that could divert them to a junk-mail folder or strip them of images and Web links. As is the case now, mail arriving from addresses that users have added to their AOL address books will not be treated as spam.

The only companys, that would be tempted to participate in this will me mass marketers AKA Spammers. The suggestion that they will might lose real mail should cause AOL and Yahoo! customers to wonder. AOL blocks port access to real POPs and AOL users should concider getting an email account at gmail, Gmail does a pretty decent job at email filtering. If one has a good email program and access to to a POP3 they can do their own filtering.