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I read that AOL and Yahoo are planning to start charging for some e-mails (primarily from businesses)--anywhere from ¼c. to 1 cent each, and that paid-for e-mails will get preferential treatment, which they were a little vague on. Supposedly one of the "benefits" is that it will cut down on spam.
What do you all think?
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As always, the Devil's in the details. Have you seen the details yet?
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I understand it's precisely the spammers who are going to have to pay. "Real" businesses don't use AOL or Yahoo. But you'd think, if the IPs can find the spammers to charge them for their E-mails, why can't they also shut them down?
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If I know yahoo! at all, they'll blanket cover everyone who sends out email in bulk, which would shut down wwftd once again. (the first time was when the IT guys at work warned me to get off the corporate servers.)
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Ok, this intrigued me so I thought I would look it up. This is what I found: Quote:
Yahoo, AOL to charge for 'direct' e-mails
February 06, 2006 10:09 IST
A new digital divide is set to separate the haves from the have-nots, with two Internet giants endorsing a system that gives preferential treatment to e-mails sent by paying subscribers.
America Online and Yahoo, two of the world's largest providers of e-mail accounts, plan to start charging an optional fee to send e-mails directly into user in-boxes without going through junk mail filters, a media report said in New York.
Users will now have to pay from a quarter of a cent to 1 cent per e-mail to ensure their messages are marked as certified and grab the attention of the receiver.
"The Internet companies say 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," the New York Times reported on Sunday.
The companies also stand to earn millions of dollars a year from the system if it is widely adopted, the daily said.
In the next two months, AOL will start accepting e-mail processed by the US-based Goodmail Systems , which will collect the electronic postage and verify the identity of the sender.
Unpaid e-mails will be subject to AOL's spam filtering process, which diverts suspicious messages to a spam folder.
Meanwhile, Yahoo has said it will start trying out Goodmail's system in the coming months but has not yet decided how paid e-mail will be differentiated from unpaid.
"In a broader sense, the move to create what is essentially a preferred class of e-mail is a major change in the economics of the Internet. Until now, senders and recipients of e-mail...each covered their own costs of using the network, with no money changing hands," the daily said.
This is interesting to me, especially if you look up what the GoodMail System consists off, and I quote
Quote:
The Goodmail CertifiedEmail service provides a clean well lighted in-box to shield consumers from phishing and online fraud
In my oppinion they are just going to be spamming or phishing in a different mannor now. Now it will be legal because they will have paid for the right.
snort!
Just my two cents.
Rev. Alimae
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Spammers are not going to pay for sending mail. A typical spammer sends out perhaps a million mail messages a day hoping to get maybe a hundred or so suckers (er hits).
A million messages at a penny each is $10.000.00 a DAY for postage. Kind of cuts into the old profit margin a bit.
But legitimate emailers (for example credit card companies) have been able to cut their costs a LOT by not having to pay for traditional postage.
I get hardly any hard mail delivered to the house any more. All my utilities, all my credit cards, my mortgage, almost everything is handled electronically. Most of them are on automatic deduction; I get an e-bill for my two electric services, they tell me when they are going to zap my checking account. Bob's my brother, out the money goes.
Similarly, my MasterCard account statement comes via email and I go online and schedule a debit from my checking account.
These companies have been getting this service pretty much free, and they save themselves 30 odd cents a month for every account holder that does this. And on top of that they don't have printing costs, mail stuffing costs, check handling costs. It's a real win-win situation.
So now they have may have to pay a penny to send their notices to me. They can gripe about it if they want, but they are still saving a real bundle.
And, in the long run if they save a bundle one or two of them may pass a small part of the savings on to me. Perhaps that will happen on the day Hell freezes over.
TEd
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Lol ok, you have me there Ted, I had not thought about it nor looked at it in the particualar light. In this instance, I will agree with the charging of monies for the e-mails.
But, and I still feel this will happen, we will start seeing spam showing up in our online mail boxes with these logo's or guarentees saying that they are not spam. It is just life.
Rev. Alimae
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and you can bet the legit companies that pay the fee will pass it on to the consumer...
formerly known as etaoin...
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One tech columnist pointed out that much spam is sent from zombie PCs anyway, so spammers can use hacked PCs to send spam, and have the zombie's owners foot the bill. Quote:
There is also potential for abuse in the postage stamp model. What the pay-per-email model doesn't necessarily stop is corporate networks being hijacked to send spam: in the vast majority of cases, spammers don't even use their own computers to send mail. Right now, many company computers end up being hacked and used to send thousands of messages. If your firm pays 0.1p for every email it sends, and one machine gets turned into a zombie that sends 5 million emails, it would sting you for £5,000. I can't think of anybody who'd fancy that.
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Alimae! Thank you! Ever since wofa asked about the details, I have been searching for that article without success. [sigh]
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You are most welcome M'Lady.
Rev. Alimae
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Pooh-Bah
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As someone who has had his email account spoofed, I find it a little scary to think that spammers might instead find a way to send junk emails and let someone else foot the bill.
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Quote:
As someone who has had his email account spoofed, I find it a little scary to think that spammers might instead find a way to send junk emails and let someone else foot the bill.
Scary but as an ex-hacker I can honestly say that it is easy to do and most hackers or spammers do not have a conscious.
Rev. Alimae
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As an ex-hacker, can you say how the payment would work? I can see how the hacking to zombify the PC would be easy, but how about the details of the payment?
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It is acutally quite simple. All you would do is to set it so that it looked like each e-mail was coming from several different computers from with in the networking system itself. Easy enough to do. Kind of like a virus or better yet a worm. Works wonders. Think of those ones you get in your messanger that send out an e-mail to each of your buddies on it and just reverse it. If it is coming from internally then you would never have to pay anything.
Rev. Alimae
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Yeahbut® How do you con the owner of the infected computer to pay? I mean, somebody's got to pay. Or did I not understand your answer?
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You did not understand the answer. By taking over the computer or network and making it look like all of the e-mails are originating from with in the company then the company is responsible for the bills. Not the hacker or spammer.
Rev. Alimae
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So it all depends on the alertness of the Accounts Payable department and the power of the company's lawyers. If the company doesn't pay I should think AOL or Yahoo! would just shut off that company's route to the spammer by no longer allowing those emails access.
I guess I was thinking of crackers cracking home user's computers.
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A few seconds reading on the company's site reveals that you have to have bought "stamps" in advance. There's no billing "after the fact" that could be assigned to someone else.
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I really don't like this.
First of all there's no need for it. I have been using AOL for years, and rarely have non-span e-mails gone through spam, and once I say it's not spam, it remembers and stops putting it there. Things like catalogues and store e-mails rarely go into my spam folder.
This looks just like an opportunity for spammers to have that kind of false reassurance, that since it's paid it must be legit.
But even if that won't happen, it looks like a pety attempt of a huge, rich corporation to squeeze out even more money for nothing. Remember AOL is part of Time Warner. And anyways, AOL charges almost $30 a month! Don't they make enough?
Also, it looks like an easy way for other stores to ambush people with junk mail electronically as well as through snail mail.
Last edited by mechanesthesia; 02/11/06 03:40 AM.
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