Hotmail vs Goodmail

Frequent Slashdot Contributor Bennett Haselton wrote in with his latest column. He says "Are we being too hard on Goodmail for their plans to charge senders a quarter-penny per message to bypass companies' spam filters? Hardly anyone has mentioned that Microsoft has been doing the same thing for years, only (surprise!) charging more. Hotmail lets senders pay a $1,400 "fee" to help get through their spam filter; when I wrote to them about my newsletter being blocked as spam, they said they knew it wasn't spam, but they told me several times they would not even talk about unblocking it unless I paid the $1,400. It's odd that so little attention has been paid to Hotmail's program, since it not only mirrors the Goodmail situation, it validates Goodmail's critics who have said that once you start charging to bypass spam filters, the next step is the marginalization of people who won't pay." Read on for more words.

As you hear words like "Hotmail" and "AOL", you may be tempted to think this doesn't affect you if you've outgrown those companies, but I think that's a mistake. First of all, if you think you might ever run a business that publishes an e-mail newsletter, you'll have to worry that your mail might be blocked unless you pay to unblock it. Second, even if you're only a subscriber to a company's newsletter and you're not worried about filters on your e-mail address, the company publishing the newsletter has to spend time and resources getting their mails unblocked that they send to other people, time that could be otherwise spent improving their services. Third, even if you're not on the Internet at all, in a real sense it affects the kind of world we all live in, if the wealthy are able to communicate with their listeners more easily than everyone else (that gap has always existed, but the Internet narrowed it, and then unblocking-mail fees widened it a little). If the Republican National Committee can get their mail out and MoveOn.org can't, then that could influence elections, and could affect your life even if you're an Iraqi peasant goat farmer who hasn't updated his blog in weeks. And of course what Microsoft and AOL do, sets a precedent for what other companies can get away with -- so every anecdote about boneheaded mail filtering that you hear about, is potentially significant if it could become the norm.

I wasn't thinking about this when I wrote to Hotmail in 2006 about their users missing our e-mails because of the filter blocking them as "spam", as I jumped through some hoops before talking to a human. But the mentality of the people that I talked to seemed to be that "non-paying sender" and "spammer" were more or less equivalent. I explained that we only send mail to people who request it, we verify all new subscriptions, and every message contains an unsubscribe link. Hotmail replied, "The filters are there for the protection of hotmail subscribers. The Junk Mail Reporting program isn't in place to help you circumvent those filters... I recommend you do what you can on your end to educate your subscribers, keep your mailing lists up to date and follow the other guidelines for senders on the postmaster.msn.com site and don't expect our junkmail filters to be modified." Call me a dreamer, but I thought the whole point of having humans in the loop was that if the filter is making a mistake, you can modify it.

(Many people have suggested that I publish via RSS instead of e-mail. For me the problem with that is that our newsletter is used to send out the location of new sites for getting around blocking software, so that by the time the last sites have gotten blocked in most places, the new ones are being mailed out. As long as people can access their e-mail accounts, they can get the new site announcements. But if we used an RSS feed instead of e-mail, then blocking software companies would just block our RSS feed. And besides, even a normal newsletter publisher would lose most of their existing subscribers if they told everybody that they had to switch over to RSS to receive the newsletter in the future. Is it right that they should have to pay that penalty just because an ISP is falsely labeling their mail as spam?)

The $1,400 "fee" that you pay to help get your mail unblocked at Hotmail's servers, is to a third-party company called Sender Score Certified, formerly known as Bonded Sender, whose certifications are used by Hotmail. I didn't think I could get anywhere discussing with them the ethics of charging people to unblock their mail as spam, so instead I asked them, what would happen if someone forked over the cash and then their enemies started filing phony "spam" complaints against them, hoping to get their certification revoked? I think this is an important question for any spam policing system, but unfortunately it usually puts people on the defensive, because there's no real answer -- if you accept spam complaints, then you allow crackpots to do damage, and if you don't accept spam complaints, how do you know if a client is spamming? Bonded Sender's rep replied, "Do you really have that many enemies? If you are running a true 'non-profit', who is that mad at you? Maybe finding this out should be a little higher on the agenda. Where is the 'peace' in Peace Fire?" I asked the same question again, and eventually he said that complaints were based on SpamCop complaints -- a system known for being set up so that anyone could report anyone as a "spammer" without proof -- and that each such complaint would cause $20 to be depleted from your bond, and once it was all gone, you'd lose your certification.

"After reading all of your emails you have sent me," he continued, "it seems that you aren't really trying to find a solution to anything. You are mainly interested in pointing out flaws in programs and letting me know about how people don't like you." Actually I don't think I have enough enemies to cause me serious problems, but I'm working on it! I aspire someday to reach the level of notoriety achieved by groups like MoveOn.org, who does have enough enemies that if systems like Hotmail's were widely deployed, MoveOn would have to worry about militants falsely reporting their mails as spam in order to cost them money and/or get them blacklisted. That's the other basic problem with certification systems: they don't just favor the wealthy, they also favor the non-controversial. Do we really want an Internet where everyone has to be careful about who they offend, because anyone could get them listed as a spammer? I mean, that would be like having a free online encyclopedia where anyone could edit your bio and say that you killed someone!

Is it legal to block someone's mail as spam until they pay you money? Whoah, before I even use the l-word, I'd better insert a disclaimer. No, not that disclaimer. Nobody could possibly think that I was a lawyer after I filed motions in court with the pages stuck together to prove that judges weren't really reading them, unless I had some kind of career death wish. The disclaimer is that at least from my own experiences suing spammers, the law is whatever the judge wants it to be. Some judges say you can sue spammers out-of-state, and some say you can't. Some of them say you can sue in Small Claims only if you've lost money, and some say you can sue for damages even if you haven't lost anything. Some of them say a non-lawyer is allowed to represent their own corporation in court, and some say no. If judges don't even agree on the basic rules, good luck getting a legal consensus on a more abstract issue. Asking objectively if deliberately blocking non-spam e-mail is "legal" is like asking "Do apples taste good?"

But as a general rule, I think courts take a dim view of systematically publishing false statements about someone to try and get them to pay you off in order to stop. Unless you're a spammer, every time Hotmail labels one of your messages as "Junk Mail", they're publishing something untrue about you (at least to everyone who sees the message labeled as junk), and if you've brought it to their attention, then they may agree the statement is untrue but they go on making it anyway. In libel law, liability is partly determined by how much someone has been harmed by the false statements about them; in the case of mail being blocked as "Junk Mail", the harm is about as direct as possible, since because it was falsely labeled as spam, most users will never see it. This is why I think people who say "Hotmail/AOL/Yahoo can do whatever they want with their private network" are missing the point. If I used my own "private network" to publish a subscription service that people use to find out the names of new convicted felons in their neighborhood so that they can avoid doing business with those people, would you have no objection if I "accidentally" included your name on the list, but promised to review your situation for one low fee of $1,400?

There was a time in the late '90's when if Microsoft had said they were going to be blocking non-partner e-mails as "junk mail" unless senders paid a $1,400 "fee" to get unblocked, Congress would have hauled up Bill Gates and given him a good wedgie and told him to cut it out. But these days the Department of Justice doesn't have time to worry about other people's lost e-mail when they can't even lose their own e-mails properly.

All this happened at about the same time Goodmail was first attracting controversy for charging senders a quarter penny per message to bypass AOL's spam filters. When the EFF registered DearAOL.com to call attention to the issue (now defunct, but the Wayback Machine saved a snapshot), I hopefully registered DearHotmail.com in case any anyone wanted to use that example as well, but nothing ever coalesced around that. Meanwhile, some random mis-fire seems to have cancelled out some other random mis-fire, and Hotmail is apparently no longer blocking my mail, at least until this article gets published.

As far as I can tell, the only reason Hotmail got off scott-free and AOL/Goodmail didn't, was that Hotmail snuck their system in quietly, while AOL and Goodmail announced their partnership with great fanfare, apparently overestimating the extent to which e-mail publishers would greet them as liberators. This doesn't reflect very well on the outrage grapevine, people.

But the lesson took -- when Goodmail recently announced their partnership with four more e-mail providers, Goodmail featured a press release on their own site, but of the four ISPs, Verizon was the only one issued their own press release. Apparently the other three saw what happened with AOL/Hotmail and got the message.

You didn't ask, but my own idea for an anti-spam system would be to follow a protocol such that when you reply to a list server to confirm your subscription, the reply goes to an address like:

list-peacefire-confirm-481534893-sender=bennett=[e-mail]

When you send that reply from your Hotmail account, Hotmail would see the "sender=bennett=peacefire.org" part of the address you're replying to, and recognize that to mean that you want to receive future messages sent from bennett - at - peacefire.org. So future messages from that address would be weighted not to be blocked as spam for that user. It wouldn't do anything to unblock person-to-person messages that get blocked as spam, but those are not mis-blocked as often as legitimate newsletters are, and this method would give newsletter publishers a way to get whitelisted at the same time that the user confirms their subscription. It wouldn't be perfect, since if the user then unsubscribes from the newsletter, but bennett - at - peacefire.org is a jerk and continues to send them mail, that mail would still get through because the Hotmail filter for that user still "remembers" that they confirmed their subscription, and doesn't know that they unsubscribed. However, the vast majority of nuisance spam comes from people you've never heard of, not from people whose newsletters you signed up for and then continued to send you mail after you unsubbed.

Or, suppose you're Amazon and you send mail to millions of users from [e-mail], but you don't want everyone to have that address whitelisted because then a spammer could use the address "[e-mail]" to spam millions of people, hoping it would get through the filter of anyone who's an Amazon customer. So in that case people could confirm by replying to:

list-peacefire-confirm-481534893-sender=orders=amazon.com&senderip=[e-mail]

When the user sent their reply to that address, Hotmail would parse out the "sender=orders=amazon.com" part and the "senderip=72.21.203.1" part, and whitelist future mails from that address that come only from that IP.

I like this idea because it treats everyone equally, regardless of wealth or popularity, as long as they confirm subscriptions to their newsletter (which is regarded as good mailing list hygiene anyway). On the other hand, if you prefer filtering systems that work better for people who are rich and never offend anybody, then you'll be pleased to know that those seem to be winning.

To summarize:

Use Gmail

Re:To summarize:

And how long until Gmail does the same thing?

When more and more services are doing it, it becomes "common practice", which becomes "acceptable practice". Google may find someday they want the extra money it would provide.

"Do No Evil" is only as effective as your definition of "evil".

Re:

And how long until Gmail does the same thing?

GMail's spam filters are over 99.9% perfect after about a week of training from the user. I still occasionally check my spam folder, heck, yesterday a message was put in Spam that shouldn't have been, the first

Re:

Until about a month ago, I was getting ~10 spam emails per day through the filters. All of them the same, obviously spam, subject lines ("RX_MEDS no pr3s needed" etc.) which on the one hand made me wonder how they were getting through but on the other made

Re:

"Do No Evil" is only as effective as your definition of "evil".

Do no evil is only as effective as your product (users) sees it. If they leave in droves for the next !evil then so will your customers (advertisers in Google's case). It is fairly self limit

Missed the point?

All you ditto heads missed the point. You can use gmail, but this is about the receiving side not the sending side. It does you no good to have a nice mail client if your outgoing emails are getting blocked by hotmail and you cannot reach your customers or the members of your web-based political organization. So you say that hotmail wouldn't block the whole gmail domain, well they might (it could potentially be a HUGE income stream!). Regardless if you are emailing on behalf of an organization you're gonna want a domain, which gmail could handle for you. But when they start blocking info@society_for_prevention_of_cruelty_to_first_po sters.org until you pony up $1400 to hotmail, and $1400 to AOL, and $1000 to Lycos, and $1800 to bigfreeemailwebsite.com, then you are effectively censored.

so next time a spam article comes up instead of being the first person to say "Use gmail!" or the fourth person to say "ditto!" Try something new and novel. RTFA!!!

Personally I have this radical belief... I believe that I have these inalienable rights. I don't care if the censor is in Washington DC or Redmond, WA it's still censorship.

Wel im not paying anything to extortion

When a client complains that his/her site gets suspended due to his/her non receipt of invoice notifier/renewal email in his/her hotmail/dugamail/omegamail/anymail account due to these companies' "policies", i explain the situation in detail and advise them to acquire a more usable and reliable email account from elsewhere.

hotmail lost many users due to that over 4 years.

Re:Wel im not paying anything to extortion

The fact that the email is not being sent is the sender's fault. This article is not true. I contacted Hotmail about my email being blocked. They were professional and gave me a list of things that I needed to do in order to resolve the issue. For email to get to Hotmail users, the sender must following the rules of the Sender ID Framework, which involves changing some DNS settings. More information about that can be found here:
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/technologie s/senderid/default.mspx [microsoft.com]

Senders are not required in any way to purchase a certificate from this third party company mentioned in the article.

Marked as Spam, eh?

Well shit, If your newsletter reads anything like your post, I'd mark that as spam too, champ.

Could be workable, if...

A "tax" of this kind could be a way around spam, but the Hotmail/Goodmail way has one fatal flaw: it's used as a profit center for the mail carrier. If the tax went to recipients of the spam, who are after all the real victims here, there could be an argument for initiating it. As it stands though, this is just another service-provider scam, a kind of subset of the hierarchical Internet.

Re:

Any pay-for-email scheme will be abused by the con artists currently profiting on spam. If the recipient gets the money, then all of those bots will start sending mail to 'victims'. If the ISP gets the money, then they will set up fake ISPs to collect em

Re:

I don't see how a "tax" like this could ever actually work as a way around spam.

Charging advertizers to get email through doesn't block any spam. Spam blockers use algorythms, etc to attempt to find and block spam, but when they fail the mail gets to the

Easy Answer:

Are we being too hard on Goodmail for their plans to charge senders a quarter-penny per message to bypass companies' spam filters?

No. Personally I think it's fraud, since you're telling and selling the customer one thing, then allowing people to bypass their own securty for a profit at the expense of it's end users.

Re:

It's not so much that a real spammer will have to pay, as much as the fact it gives them a control over your email that you don't have. Since you are the end user you should be able to define what is and isn't spam. Giving them control makes you powerless.

Fascinating

"I find your ideas fascinating, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter"

Change over to GMail

I suggest your encourage your subscribers to change over to GMail. I made the change after two of my ISP's (AT&T and Comcast) refused to forward e-mail to me from my own domain. I couldn't even whitelist myself, because they'd blacklisted all of NameZero.

Google, OTOH, deliverers everything, and does a 99%+ accurate job of putting spam in the spam folder, and e-mail in my inbox. Once I was able to accurately see all my e-mail, I was able to kill a very old address that wasn't part of my personal domain, but forwarded through it, that was generating up to 500 spam messages a day. I wasn't aware how bad it had gotten due to the first named ISPs hiding the problem, rather than showing me what all my e-mail looked like. Fond as I was of this address, when it becomes this kind of problem, even good memories of my first e-mail and early Internet days has to go. Google makes this possible, all this for free!

All things considered, I'm sure Google would love to take away all of Hotmail's customers, and they'll do it by providing better service at an equal or better price.

Re:Change over to GMail

And there's also the forcibly-change-over-to-gmail option - we had some important aolusers (board members) at a previous job; they never got important board listserv emails or massmails or such, they refused to leave AOL and we couldn't afford any of the solutions to get around the AOL blocking.

So I created individual gmail accounts for all the aolusers which we sent to, and set the gmail accounts to auto forward to their AOL accounts. Problem solved.

Learn from the pros

You just have to learn from the spam pros and randomize your newsletters to make them look legitimate.

I kind of agree

That hotmail and goodmail should not be charging people to unblock spam.

Instead they should simply refuse to unblock spam, period.

Yes, that means that newsletters like this would not get through.

I have a Phone at home. If some insane lunatic started up the idea of calling all his friends having them call all of their friends, as a means of sending out important news, I would laugh at him.

I also laugh at anyone, even this 'nice' newsletter that actually thinks EMAIL is an apropriate means of obtaining this information.

RSS is one way to go.

ANOTHER way to go is messageboard style.

There are still more ways to send out information. You can take an applet that you give to your subscribers that does something similar to hat phone idea does. While it does not work on a phone, it would work on the internet.

But the IMMENSE problem of spam pretty much means that NO, NEWSLETTERS ARE NOT APPROPRIATE FOR EMAIL.

Find another solution, the one you are trying is causing huge problems for the interent. It is NOT our job to help you perpetuate a BAD idea, no matter how much your personal non-profit benefits from the bad idea.

Follow the Money

A core principle in figuring out any kind of shady shenanigans is to follow the money. The problem with Goodmail, and with Microsoft's pay-to-play fee, is that the money is being paid to the wrong party. Paying the fee to the mailbox-hosting ISP cannot help but create a corrupting conflict of interest, making this a bribe. Nasty spam will be allowed through if the vendor has the $$$ to pay, and legitimate bulk mail that people have opted into will be blocked, if the news letter is not coming from a moneyed source.

Instead, consider a P2P scheme where the postage is paid directly from the sender to the receiver, where the receiver themselves can white-list a sender as not having to pay. It would produce these kinds of effects:

• For most personal onesey twosey mail, sending volume approximately equals receiving volume, so the postage payment is mostly a wash, with chatty people paying quiet people a modest amount on average.
• For opt-in news letters and mailing lists, the receiver would be expected to white-list the source, e.g. I would white-list my subscription to Bugtraq [wikipedia.org].
• Spammers and "legitimate" bulk mail advertisers alike would have to pay in proportion to the volume of mail they get delivered (non-delivered mail doesn't pay the postage).

There's a bunch of interesting things that can be done with this model:

• Postage is just an offer to pay, which only causes actual payment if the receiver redeems the postage.
• Postage can be nothing more than a GPG certificate attached to the mail, validated by the receiver's MTA or MUA.
• Receivers can dial the amount of postage they require to accept an e-mail. They could set it to a static value, e.g. "at least 2 cents or I'm not interested", or they could even use SpamAssassin to dynamically set the postage, e.g. "at least 10 cents * the spamass score" so that highly spammy mail requires much more postage than plaintext free of spam phrases.
• Gold miners can set up spam trap mail addresses that do nothing but accept postage and throw the mail away. This is abusive to spammers who are paying to have their mail delivered. Cry me a river :-)

SpamCop

...complaints were based on SpamCop complaints -- a system known for being set up so that anyone could report anyone as a "spammer" without proof...

This is where I stopped reading. SpamCop requires proof in the form of the spam email itself. What other proof of spamminess could there be?

Nobody cares...

Okay. This will come off sounding as flamebait, but at least read it before marking it as such.

I'm willing to bet my Karma (what Karma, right?) that Bennett Haselton is, himself, a spammer. I periodically stumble, to my dismay, across his ramblings posted here as front-page material. With most of them overly self-righteous and witchunty in nature, I think he has a little something to hide.

So, to keep things concise I'll simply list facts here:

• He delegitimizes spam-fighting cases by attempting to ridicule judges with his website, judgejokes.com [judgejokes.com]. This is even more instrumental than it seems:
  • It is registered by his censor-fighting organization, Peacefire. Because making fun of judges is totally a worthwhile project for an organization as such.
    
  • It documents [judgejokes.com] both his solicitation of other spammers, and lack of understanding of the law.
• He's worked on filter-circumvention software, which made news years ago [com.com]. A direct quote from that site: "That software, Haselton and the IBB acknowledge, could have other uses here at home".
  
• He spams Slashdot with countless articles that could be summarized to 1-to-2 lines (and often are by comments shortly after being posted). A few of these are linked as related articles above.
  
• He takes huge issue any time that any of his emails aren't received. This article is evidence enough.
  
• And a few other things. I know I'm forgetting many. Anyone else want to step in?
  

Oh, and do yourself a favor, Bennett. Visit Web Pages That Suck [webpagesthatsuck.com] to learn how not to design a webpage. I have yet to see one of your pages look even half-way professional -- which should be important to you if you really want Peacefire to catch on.

Now commence the -1, Flamebait if you see fit. =D

Re:

But GMail has advertisments based on keywords of your email. Thats Evil Capitalism too. Why cant a company just pay millions of dollars to keep a good email service for free with no ways of them making money, just so people can use a non-ISP Email addres

Re:Hwo dare they

Yes they do, but the big difference as I see it is that they are up-front about it.
Google: We give you free e-mail, with spam filtering in exchange for advertisements on the side bar.
Hotmail: ditto, oh, and we let pay for spam through too, but we didn't say that.

-nB

Did you miss the point?

why, yes, I think you did.

Let us say you have a business, and as part of that business, you send emails to your customers that sign up for it. Not spam, this is information your customers want from you.

Some of your customers use hotmail. Not hotmail wants to charge YOU 1400 dollars to get through there system. That's a problem. It's extortion, it's being a bad internet neighbor, and it breaks the basic premise of email;which may be ok, If when someone signs up for the free email gets clear notification that someone might have to pay 1400 dollars to get an email to them.

They no it's wrong and thats why they try to hide this information from everybody but the person the want to extort.