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ISPs Starting To Charge for 'Guaranteed' Email Delivery
Journal written by Presto Vivace (882157) and posted by
Zonk
on Sat Jun 09, 2007 03:26 PM
from the i-gare-on-tee dept.
from the i-gare-on-tee dept.
Presto Vivace writes "Under the guise of fighting spam, five of the largest Internet service providers in the U.S. plan to start charging businesses for guaranteed delivery of their e-mails. In other words, with regular service we may or may not deliver your email. If you want it delivered, you will have to pay deluxe. 'According to Goodmail, seven U.S. ISPs now use CertifedEmail, accounting for 60 percent of the U.S. population. Goodmail--which takes up to 50 percent of the revenue generated by the plan--will for now approve only mail sent by companies and organizations that have been operational for a year or more. Ordinary users can still apply to be white-listed by individual ISPs, which effectively provides the same trusted status.'"
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IT: Pay-per-email and the "Market Myth" 295 comments
Bennett Haselton has written a thoughtful piece on the latest developments in the pay-for-email schemes making the rounds from some of the big players in the world of AOL. This one is really worth your time, so please click on and read what he has to say.
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Fighting spam? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Fighting spam? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Fighting spam? (Score:5, Informative)
No, you are really wrong.
The point behind guaranteed delivery is that the ISP will not blacklist your domain/ip address regardless of how many spam reports they receive. This is the whole point behind goodmail.
I just spend hours in a meeting discussing this very topic. Our company was blacklisted by AOL because too many people reported our email as spam (it's all mail that they opted in for -- default is out). The result was all of AOL delivery was blacklisted. Eventually we got it fixed, but the next tier to the solution is to pay GoodMail $$ to effectively certify our domains as legitimate senders and they pay AOL a portion of their proceeds to guarantee permanent whitelist status no matter what the users do.
The only criteria that AOL has leveled against us is if someone tags our email as spam, we have to remove them from the mailing list. But I don't know if this will change or not with the introduction of GoodMail into our mail delivery system.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is that part of the registration sends a message to the
Re:Fighting spam? (Score:5, Insightful)
If he tags what you sent as confirmation to his request, what do you think the chances are that they will also tag your newsletter?
A lot of AOL users tag messages as SPAM when they don't want to see them anymore. It's easier than opting-out and so they abuse the process. They have no repercussions to their actions.
But a lot of users do this. I see it in my house where I run my own mail server and my own spam filter. It's a bayesian filter so you have to tell it when it was wrong. Wife won't tell it anything but she complains about the spam she's getting. Can't help her. She's being obstinant and dumb.
Re:Fighting spam? (Score:4, Interesting)
The best option I have found is to include a unique identifier in the message and setup a 'feed back loop' with aol. They send you a notification when someone marks a message from your domain as spam. We remove them from our system and then contact them to explain why their lazy actions effect other aol users. Usually they are shocked that they have been caught and vow never to do it again. They often also ask to get included in the system again.
Re:Fighting spam? (Score:5, Funny)
Surely you meant to type:
"Me too!"
Ahem. Thank you, thank you. The old jokes are.. well.. old.
Re:Fighting spam? (Score:4, Insightful)
I was thinking of the repercussion as something you would experience if you were using a bayesian filter.
If you tag indiscriminantly everything that you don't want delivered for any reason, they you will start getting more false positives because it's an adaptive AI process. There is a little care and feeding of the whole filtering process you have to pay attention to.
I don't believe that AOL is going to use something like this. If you tag email as spam, AOL takes it upon themselves to send you a warning email and if you don't opt them out they black list you (eventually). What would be a repercussion to the consumer is the eventual increase in false positives -- giving the consumer a repercussion to their indiscriminant feedbacks. No one is made aware that there is an effect.
And just to clarify -- I'm not talking here about the obviously unsolicited email, but the email that is solicited but no longer wanted. The consumer took a positive action to get the email and now no longer wants it. What I am definitely not talking about here is the email that you never asked for, or where opted-in by means of fine print that few can even read at light grey and 6pt font.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Your personal incredulity is not a rebuttal. I actually developed and run a site where each user pays us close to two
Re:Fighting spam? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Fighting spam? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ten years ago I would agree. But now I don't.
The confirmation of an email address isn't valuable anymore. It's too easy to get real addresses en masse without anyone confirming the address. There once was a time when people would pay big money for lists of confirmed email addresses as a list for spamming. I don't know that there is much value in this anymore.
The process of sending spam is basically Fire and Forget so there's no added value to having a confirmation to the address. I have many records where people try to send email to random names or even characters on my domain and none of them could have ever been confirmed. And they keep coming. Add to that the back-scatter spam and you've no need for addresses being confirmed.
Go ahead, confirm your address. The spammers already have it and they don't really care if it's confirmed or not. They'll keep using it for months to come. And at least it gives the legitimate mailings a chance to play honest and opt you out without getting punched in the nose.
For legitimate purposes, if the sender provides and opt-out mechanism then it's the consumers responsiblity to use it and the marketers responsibility to honor it without qualification. But if you don't provide this mechanism then you should be labelled spam and prosecuted.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
For AOL, they required only two things from us, and we haven't run into problems:
1) Publish an SPF record (they were pushing it big-time). I'd recommend a loose policy that states "if it doesn
Re:Fighting spam? (Score:5, Interesting)
1. At the sender side, for those senders who are paying Goodmail, it adds a token to the e-mail that recipients can verify. This part could be great, if they open up a public way to validate that token (and it's in their interest to, I think). Spam filters like SpamAssassin could then score the e-mail differently. Either Goodmail is useless, or it's useful. If it's useless, recipients can ignore the token. If it's useful, recipients can decide to apply less filtering - or they can apply all the usual filters, and just (using SpamAssassin as an example) apply a negative point or two to Goodmail so it's less likely to get filtered.
2. At the recipient side for those recipients who are Goodmail "partners", it guarantees that your mail will bypass all other filters. This part is dubious. Will they regret becoming partners? Maybe, if people start sending spam that's signed by Goodmail. Can they get out of their partnership or change the terms? Dunno. Will the market sort this out? You bet. If Goodmail partners start delivering more spam than non-partners, people will switch to the non-partners.
2. Also at the recipient side for those recipients who are Goodmail "partners", it adds a pretty blue ribbon, etc. to the "chrome" of the e-mail. Yes, the chrome is unforgeable. No, users can't tell the difference between a blue ribbon in the chrome and a blue ribbon in the body. AOL tried this years ago with "Certified E-Mail", so you could tell when a message was REALLY from AOL. Did it stop phishing? No. This part is security theater.
Nobody gets blacklisted. Right now, ALL our mail is essentially second-class mail, subject to all sorts of filters. GoodMail creates a first-class tier that potentially bypasses all that if you pay for the "postage" (which is only 1/20th of a cent for non-profits). Again, the market will sort out whether or not that postage is useful. In fact, "postage" is probably the wrong word - it's more like "notarized" e-mail.
You're checking the wrong boxes (Score:3, Insightful)
Breach of contract (Score:4, Insightful)
Declaring those who haven't paid the protection racket as not "real mail" is not really something that I would envision as something which would pass a non-bribed judge.
Re:Breach of contract (Score:4, Interesting)
Declaring those who haven't paid the protection racket as not "real mail" is not really something that I would envision as something which would pass a non-bribed judge."
Guess what, this is exactly how the USPS works. They are not responsible for making sure the mail is delivered unless you pay more for it, like certified mail, etc.
How do I know? I was told this in so many words when I had mail lost and complained to the Post Office about it.
It was basically, "if you want to make sure it gets there, have it insured, otherwise..."
Yeah, nice little racket the USPS has too!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
is a clause that specifies that the ISP can modify the terms at any time
by posting them on the website and that you agreed to it.
Let's rate the ISP's (Score:5, Funny)
Cox - not very evil yet
Time Warner - The incarnation of Evil
Verizon - Pure evil
They didn't say who the other three are, but I'll guess here
AOL - Strange evil
BellSouth - Pure Evil
Mediacom - Incompetent Evil
Not that I like spam but.... (Score:4, Insightful)
If there's any way to organize and refuse to relay mail from any of these greedy self-appointed guardians, I'd certainly be interested. Blacklisting all mail out of their domains would probably be extremely educational for them.
Good for the goose...good for the gander.
radio (Score:3, Interesting)
Read up on the early history of Radio. It used to be free to broadcast. Now it's really expensive. Soon the only web pages and mailing activities will be those that are sanctioned by the key masters.
No, it's cheap to radio broadcast, Pirate radio [blackcatsystems.com] statio
recipe for disaster? (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe I could see it if.... (Score:2)
Well (Score:3, Interesting)
Since it costs money to set up an infrastructure to accept a cost of any type (reliable servers, an organization, ect) charging actual money rather than hash cycles or CAPTCHAs makes the most sense, and is also the only practical way for a big organization to send emails to a bunch of users.
Well the PROBLEM is that... (Score:4, Insightful)
Have a decent-sized list on which you're doing a daily run, and even at a quarter of a cent you're suddenly looking at thousands of dollars a month out of pocket.
So now all of those sites and services and lists either: A) Stop sending email and/or go out of business, or B) Start charging for the stuff you used to get for free.
Is it so hard for people to figure this stuff out? Apply a cost somewhere and--one way or another--you're going to pay it.
Yeah, that works (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yeah, that works (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well (Score:4, Insightful)
But who do you think it going to pay that cost?
I'm on a lot of mailing lists. So 300 emails a day works out to 75 cents US. Which adds up to $273 a year that I have to pay. If you look at it from the point of view of the mailing lists, they might have 10,000 users which means every email costs them $25US. For someone like Debian this is death. For someone like Microsoft -- They'll just add $25 to their product prices.
When the F... are you going to realize that pay per use is not a means to being effective for anything. It's a means of generating money. It doesn't save you money and it doesn't get you any more freedom, happiness, or flexability
I want my share too. (Score:4, Interesting)
That model is available - feel free to use it :-) (Score:3, Insightful)
And this will help how? (Score:4, Insightful)
I can imagine the new "training" course at the grade schools:
Don't download music because you'll get sued for thousands of dollars by the RIAA and then have to pay thousands of dollars because a "virus" sent out emails from your computer!
Infrastructure problem (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Whitelisting is a solved problem: Hashcash (Score:4, Informative)
Dubious statistic (Score:5, Insightful)
This is probably true as stated, but almost meaningless. Each of those ISPs will be counting the number of users that have email accounts with them, and then they just added up those numbers. The problem with this is that many users have more than one email account and don't use the one provided by their ISP - a large chunk of that 60% probably uses yahoo, hotmail, or gmail. Many people will also have another account provided by their employer.
It is not particularly useful to count email accounts as a fraction of the US population.
Spam Filters are Broken (Score:5, Interesting)
I think part of the problem is that spam filters are generally broken and don't work that well. Part of the problem is that no one has seriously thought about how crappy the approach is. The other part of the problem is that their is little or no personal ownership of the filtering of spam.
When the ISP/customer have no relationship on identification of what is spam the ISP has to aim really high and take the approach that anything that is obviously spam is not delivered and everything else is. The net effect is the ISP might not deliver porn spam, but they'll deliver many other things with impunity. If there was a more aggressive involvement of the customer/consumer of the email then you could better tune the filters to match each user better.
SpamAssassin is the worse offender. It's origination was to do static regex checks and add points for each hit. And when you were done, the points put you either IN or OUT. But in order for SA to work you have to tune the number of points added for each regex test. And this is constantly changing. But for it to work, you have to be constantly monitoring the results. No one does this on a consistent basis.
A critical drawback with their approach is the constant game of catch-up they have to play in order to get the filtering to work correctly and then someone has to run some update script to hopefully get everything working correctly. Again, this has to be done continually like the tuning or it will start to fail.
Bayesian filters offered a great alternative but they quickly turned into their own problems. SA uses Bayes, but it's not effective because of the lack of feedback from the consumer (in most cases). It's also prone to over-rides by their own auto-whitelisting. Convenient, but deadly. Where Bayes lacks goes back to the original problems of non-customized feedback and involvement. It's very inconvenient to try and set up something like bogofilter to run for every individual in a group of 1000's so the mail admin makes one file for everyone thereby generalizing the statistics and making them less effective because they have to be good enough for everyone but not so good they remove any of the really serious spam.
And yes, SA does user specific Bayes filtering. I used it for three months and it sucked. It was not a very effective spam filtering system even with user specific bayesian filtering included. It's also getting pretty darn slow. Slow enough to become a consideration.
DSpam is effective, customized, and slower than molasses in january. It will also lose email. But YMMV and I don't really care to hear about how great it is. I lost a lot of email and a lot of money as the result of it. Perhaps some day they can get their act together, but there will always be a severe performance penalty for CRM114. But Bayesian filtering can still compete with CRM statistical success with 100X performance increase.
So what do you do about spam filtering?
The technology exists to effectively and efficiently filter spam. But that's not the problem. The technology that is used today is relatively lame because there are shortcomings abound that prevent a good solution for someone really large (like an ISP).
The problem is to redefine how the consumer is going to own their own spam filtering effectiveness. No more auto-whitelist. No more auto-blacklist, No more auto-update of Bayesian tokens. All of these can be carefully manipulated to taint the statistics and allow delivery in droves. The consumer must take ownership of their mailbox in the same manner that they are expected to take ownership of their credit card information on the internet.
a bad figure if I've ever heard one (Score:3, Insightful)
This is making a REALLY bad assumption that an ISP generated email address is used by the account holder. Problem is, once there became multiple ways to get online about 10 years ago, LOTS of people switched to web-mail for the permanence and convenience. (Hotmail, Gmail, yahoo, etc) I would guess that any major ISP has less than half of their accounts use their provided email services.
No gurantee of service? (Score:4, Interesting)
This cant be legal. "here is your service. Oh, you want it to actually work, well pay up"
Net Neutrality (Score:4, Insightful)
In short: They already have.
Of course, I don't think net neutrality legislation will cover email -- not that I care much, I really don't send mail to many people at AOL -- but it's just a perfect example to all the Libertarian idiots out there of why we do need government intervention sometimes.
The free market will sort it out? Sure...
Competing Vendors. (Score:4, Interesting)
This is exactly the same problem with backbone pipe vendors wanting to get paid for "premium" bit transfer.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Now I understand why the block port 25. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice plan.
Give me back my ports and I won't have to worry about spam or your fees.
Spam Filter (Score:4, Insightful)
Feedback Form (Score:5, Funny)
(X) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(X) Sending email should be free
(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
(X) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
protection racket much? (Score:4, Funny)
Thats a nice email (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:finally (Score:5, Insightful)
This has NOTHING to do with stopping Spam.
This is all about generating revenue from Spam.
Re:finally (Score:4, Insightful)
Give this man a cigar.
Not only will it generate revenue for delivering spam, but it will also mean the end of non-cost based mail delivery. Think mailing lists and personal domain servers.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Some sort of "pay us [more] or we