Order of the Bath

Prompted by giafly’s comment on my earlier post, which pointed out that AOL had corrected/clarified/backtracked on their earlier statement, I have been taking another look at the issue.

There is a lot of comment around both for and against and, having sifted out the many trolls and flames, there is not much intelligent thinking around that I can see. What I have learned is that the principle of bulk email certification, for that is what this is, is not new. The major difference which has got people all heated is that the model is to charge per item rather than a flat fee. The remainder of the story only concerns AOL customers; that is that suitably certified mail, by a variety of agencies, will be presented as such in their inboxes. That is of no concern to the rest of us. The spectre that this heralds some sort of precedent for all mail, or that uncertified mail will become any less reliable than it is already, perhaps due to neglect of the spam filters, is just not plausible. AOL will continue to serve their customers in the best way that they can because their business depends on it.

This entry was posted on 11 Mar 2006 at 17:57 by Rick and is filed under email, Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.