Order of the Bath

Verified email, at a cost

You may have seen the announcement the other day that AOL and Yahoo have a wizard wheeze for solving the spam problem. They will charge non-spamming bulk email senders a fraction of a penny per email to guarantee delivery. dg [link edited 21 Feb] has a good commentary on this pointing out that it would mean the end of email as we know it and seems to be more of a revenue generator than a service for customers.

The catch is that, other than these premium emails, everything else will go into the junk box unless it is from known correspondents. So don’t expect to get mail from someone that you haven’t pre-authorised, such as long lost cousin Gertie or the confirmation that the widget that you just bought is on its way.

This entry was posted on 7 Feb 2006 at 12:14 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.

3 Responses to “Verified email, at a cost”

1
giafly said on 9 Mar 2006 at 19:00
This blog by an “AOL insider” is essential reading.

“The Left, the Right, the Bad, and the Good(mail)

Many of us have been following the AOL/Yahoo! Goodmail press lately. While the deal was initially announced back in October last year, for some reason the PR engines only began to get going in February 2006. What sparked the sudden change in direction?

While I can’t necessarily answer that question completely, I believe it was due to some miscommunication and misunderstanding for which AOL may have even been partly to blame. And for our part, we tried to set the record straight and emphasize that:

1. Goodmail is an optional program for mailers who are interested in participating.
2. Goodmail is AOL’s third whitelist (to date) with the possibility for more.
3. AOL’s other two whitelists (“AOL Whitelist” and “AOL Enhanced Whitelist”) are not going away.”

More: Carl Hutzler’s Blog
2
Rick said on 9 Mar 2006 at 19:38
I am going to have to read that much more closely than I have time for tonight but my main concern is for the little guy that falls between the big commercial business and the charities that qualify for the pro bono service. Although some, like Rootsweb, have a commercial organisation behind them, they are operated on a non profit basis—will they qualify? Others are just one guy, a newsletter, and a mailing list of a hundred thousand or so, Fred Langa comes to mind—do they qualify?