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Companies will soon have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp if they want to be certain that their e-mail will be delivered to many of their customers.
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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.
Yahoo and AOL say the new system is a way to restore some order to e-mail, which, because of spam and worries about online scams, has become an increasingly unreliable way for companies to reach their customers, even as online transactions are becoming a crucial part of their businesses.
Oh, and fatten their pocket books at the same time.
I personally don't like the idea either. Changes the economy of the entire Internet. If AOL can charge businesses so can every other ISP. Soon it's not just business paying but everyone. Thinking of such chaos gives me a headache.
Crap, I thought I just bought my last stamp this week as I can now pay all my bills online ... my contempt for AOL has reach new levels. Amazing!
If you're talking millions of emails per year and even, in a few cases, millions per month, then that's quite a bit of change going to whoever charges for the digital stamp.
I think this is stupid, we just need a new protocol. We don't need to bastardize the current one in the other direction opposite of spam.
Its important to note that it isn't applied to "all" email. You can still send an email to yahoo and aol, and it will still get through, and users can still read it.
This system allows certain preferred vendors (read: People who pay) to get preferred status - namely, by default, they won't immediately be treated as bulk/spam when they send hundreds of emails at once.
It might be a great thing (lead to knowing who the spammers are), or it might be a terrible thing (lead to all emails sent to yahoo or aol costing money). Time will tell which direction it goes in.
Regardless, it is their choice how to handle their network. But when they start charging for the same service that is free elsewhere, they will start to lose customers. Its a competitive disadvantage, and one that a vast majority of online companies will not be willing to play along with - resulting in reduced user functionality. (If aol started charging for ALL emails, and ebay says no, then aol users wont be able to get their ebay emails - and will switch providers to find someone that will).
Its market forces at work, and in this case, the market has plenty of competition, so the changes will likely not deeply impact customers for long.
I've got no beef with it, at least in its current implementation.
It'd be cheaper to set up their own email servers in the long run and just send mail from those.
It's clearly not the spam issue that's at the heart of this, it's a way to make some dollar.
Use a decent spam filter and you'll see next to no junk anyway... and if anyone did want to spam after this pay-scheme is implemented I'm sure they quite simply would do so using their own software.
And what happens when a spammer IP spoofs as a "trusted" sender? The spam goes straight to the user's inbox and the company that is paying becomes victimized along with the user while AOL gets payed to deliver more spam?
Probably the paying companies will have to authenticate (thinking certficates and public/private keys here) when they talk with the SMTP(Extended) server...
Won't impact anyone unless they choose to pay - as Roja says there's too much competition and ingrained user experience to force a pay regime for all emails. I just hope they make that rule about the user expecting emails concrete - it's be nice if they required the user to opt-in (rather than being opted-in by default) but I guess that's be clutching at smoke...
Maugrim_The_Reaper wrote:Won't impact anyone unless they choose to pay - as Roja says there's too much competition and ingrained user experience to force a pay regime for all emails. I just hope they make that rule about the user expecting emails concrete - it's be nice if they required the user to opt-in (rather than being opted-in by default) but I guess that's be clutching at smoke...
There was a whiff of smoke for the same type of function in AT&T's lines for servers (such as Google) where they'd offer a premium service for higher quality (not neccesarily more) bandwidth and packet routing. It's like D3, all smoke and mirrors until I see something concrete
Moocat wrote:There was a whiff of smoke for the same type of function in AT&T's lines for servers (such as Google) where they'd offer a premium service for higher quality (not neccesarily more) bandwidth and packet routing. It's like D3, all smoke and mirrors until I see something concrete
That proposal and desire actually worries me a little bit more.
Unfortunately, there will almost always be *someone* willing to pay to get special treatment. As a result, if AT&T (and other backbone providers) start selling preferred routes to people, eventually anyone NOT on a preferred route will be at a disadvantage. The nice thing is that like the protection racket, it doesn't work very well until you have a majority of people paying, and getting to a majority from zero is tough.
Thankfully, many providers are already standing firm against it (Google for example), as they should. However, long-term, that desire worries me. It could definitely ruin the internet as it exists today.