AOL Won't Budge on Email Tax

deman1985 writes "InformationWeek reports that AOL has no intentions to budge on its use of certified email. The company today released a statement apparently in response to the vast amounts of criticism over the past week from consumers and various organizations. From the article: 'We believe more choices, and more alternatives, for safety and e-mail authentication is a good thing for the Internet, not bad,' said an AOL spokesman. 'Everything that AOL has in place today free for e-mail senders remains -- and will only improve.' The programs critics aren't so optimistic, but that doesn't seem to be hampering the company's plans. In a quote that could only be labeled short and sweet, AOL announced, 'Implementation of this timely and necessary safety and security measure for our members takes place in the next 30 days. Mark it on your calendars.'"

Yawn.

[C10H14N2]

Since I don't have a single family member, friend or business contact with an AOL address--and can't remember the last time I did, must be at least five years ago--I really couldn't care less.

might seem a little aloof

[caffeinemessiah]

this might seem a little aloof...but why do we, as Slashdot, care if people who mass-mail AOL users are going to be charged a really, really idiotic e-mail tax? AOL has never been known for cutting-edge technology and innovation (unless you want to count free CDs being used as frisbees/mirrors/coasters). Let the AOL spammers pay more to spam their gullible victims...I'm sure no one who reads /. uses AOL, and fewer probably care...

Whatever

[jridley]

You know how most places with rebates and such won't accept a PO box as a valid email address?

I'd be sorely tempted to say "no aol.com addresses" when people sign up for stuff. Just put a note on the signup page that says "due to AOL's policies, we can't guarantee that you will receive the email that we send to you, therefore an AOL.COM email address is not a reliable means of communication.

Not a "tax"

[massysett]

I know it's just a headline, but "tax" is putting this much too strongly. Taxes are levied by governments. Governments have a monopoly on the "legitimate" use of force--thus, if you don't pay your tax, the government has the authority to knock you upside the head, confiscate your property, put you in jail, etc. AOL will have no such authority to collect this fee. Mass mailers will be perfectly free not to pay the fee, and to encourage AOL users to dump that awful walled gate of an "online service." This is no tax.

Opt in, or die!

[RingDev]

FTA: "Certified Email prevents and blocks spammers from sending e-mails to online users," said the AOL spokesman. Goodmail's program is 100-percent opt-in;

So in other words, Opt-ing and pay, or your email will be blocked. Spam kings willing to chip in would appear to be uneffected. Average joe mailing lists, kiss it good bye. Which beggs the question, why does anyone use AOL anymore?

-Rick

Will they allow me to filter certified emails out?

[defile]

Anyone who pays AOL to send me a certified email has just got to be someone I don't want to talk to.

It's a Company, folks

[Puls4r]

They're trying to make a buck. Are you surprised? We are well our on way to paying for email. First comes the "premium" packages. You know, if you want a virus and spam free inbox with the ability to send mass mails. Later you have to pay for intermediate mail as well - if you send over a certain amount. The last step is to announce that because of the many security threats due to viruses and becuase of spam abuse and the high volume of email, EVERYONE will have to pay. It's an enterprise. It will start with the big companies, and once they force it on the market, the smaller companies will follow.

Isn't it funny how...

[JustNiz]

Isn't it funny how businesses think were stupid enough to believe statements like the following:

>>> Implementation of this timely and necessary safety and security measure for our members

Of course their motiviation is all about concern for the end-user. The fact that they will make money on every fricking email has no bearing on their decision to implement this.

Re:Yawn.

[JustNiz]

This sets a precedent. If they actually get away with this it will be a clear indicator to other providers (i.e. yours) to charge for emails and probably other net-based services too.

No AOL email addresses allowed.

[slashkitty]

You will start seeing that more and more on webpage signup forms. If you have an AOL email account, expect your internet world to get smaller.

I have already started adding it to signup forms on my site (forums that require email activation for example). There is no way I'm paying to send emails to new users.

Of course, this could end up with AOL users having to PAY for signups on things like email lists and other subscriptions, that would otherwise be free.

Re:It's a Company, folks

[garcia]

They're trying to make a buck. Are you surprised? We are well our on way to paying for email.

Yeah ok, sure. Wake me up when SMTP is taxed by the government. Until then my mail server will happily send and receive mail.

Let the market correct this absurdity

[Ossifer]

I for one will be blocking all @aol.com addresses from my email servers until AOL agrees to pay me 10 per email.

What goes around, comes around. As I previously suggested [slashdot.org], internet extortionists risk everything...

How many fools will remain with AOL when other ISPs start blocking their email?

Re:might seem a little aloof

[SCHecklerX]

Because some of us run legitimate lists with several AOL members on, and AOL *already* makes things miserable for us. This makes it worse to the point where I may have to tell my AOL users that I cannot support them. Considering the president of the club I do this for is an AOL user, it likely means I won't be the one providing the service any longer. And I refuse to sign up on any Yahoo! groups, so I'll end up being the one excluded.

Of course a mass-mailing organization opposes it

[jfengel]

Of course MoveOn opposes it. MoveOn is exactly the sort of organization who gets hit by this. They send out large quantities of email, presumably to people who have signed up for it. If they send out a work-daily email to 100,000 AOL customers, at a $.001 non-profit rate (I'm making these numbers up, but they're on the rough order of magnitude) that's $100 a day, perhaps $20,000 a year. That's real money to a nonprofit, even if it's half the cost of a single stamp per person for an entire year.

The question would be whether AOL plays nicely. If they have a non-profit rate, does that mean that they WILL absolutely demand their inch of green? Or will they note that MoveOn plays by the spam rules and not block their emails? Will AOL extort that $20k a year even if MoveOn obviously isn't spamming?

I'm a little ticked that MoveOn is trying to pretend that they're fighting for the general freedom of Internet, lest AOL start extorting your grandmother to send baby pictures. In reality they're just interested in themselves. Rightly so, perhaps, but the cloak of hysteria bugs me.

Re:Opt in, or die!

[jfengel]

Goodmail is also supposed to block abuse, even from people who pay. When you sign up with Goodmail you have to sign a contract. I don't know the details of that contract, so perhaps I'm wrong, but I suspect that they will enforce the CAN-SPAM rules (not that I'm thrilled about them, but they do make spam easier to filter).

Remember, Goodmail's sole reason for existence is to limit spam, while allowing legitimate mail. If they block personal emails, or allow through v1@gra ads, they're going to lose customers fast. AOL hopes to attract customers with this, not drive them away.

Aol Has made ONE mistake here...

[gurps_npc]

They should be charging 2 cents and refunding 1/2 the money collected to subscribers.

You want to send me spam email, pay me.

Also, EVERYONE complaining about this is a spammer. They don't think they are spammers, but they are. If the recepients want you on their email, they will put you in their address book and you won't be charged a thing.

Re:It's a Company, folks

[qwijibo]

What you underestimate is the power of inertia. The current email system is free of charge. Moving to one that is not free isn't something that can be forced on everyone. That would require that the overwhelming majority of users in the world were switched to some new fee based email system. Some companies may try to force it on their users, but once that makes them incompatible with the rest of the world, their users get cut off. The reason we don't have a better email system already is because this inertia is incredibly powerful, even when a majority of the people who would implement a better system are in favor of it.

Re:might seem a little aloof

[sjames]

Web hosting takes a hit as well. Hosting customers set their business up somewhere, and have all of their mail (apam and all) forwarded to their AOL account. AOL, apparently not bothering to check headers (to see that while the mail IS spam, the last hop happened at their user's request) just chunks the whole class C into their badguy list without comment.

Of course the customers are SHOCKED at the suggestion that AOL is a bad ISP! something MUST be wrong on our end!!!

Solution?: Any support request involving email forwarding to an AOL address gets the standard 'get a real ISP' response. Followup complaints to /dev/null.

Re:Aol Has made ONE mistake here...

[m50d]

Also, EVERYONE complaining about this is a spammer. They don't think they are spammers, but they are. If the recepients want you on their email, they will put you in their address book and you won't be charged a thing.

You overestimate the typical AOL user. They probably won't think to add the shop they just bought from to their address book - but they sure as hell want to receive their order confirmation.

Re:might seem a little aloof

[The_Sock]

You're compairing a private enterprise allowing people to pay to have their e-mail sent through without spam filtering for a cost to a government locking up people under the guise of "fighting terrorism"?

In a free democratic society you vote with a ballot. In the free market you vote with your dollars. You can help stop both of these problems.

Re:Yawn.

[Valdrax]

I see no problem with this. If you want to send out mass mailings, you pay for it. Someone has to.

I belong to a public mailing list right now (and have belonged to others before). The lists are free, are typically over 3/4 lurkers and 1/4 active posters, and never have more than 300 people subscribed to them at a time. I've corresponded with at least two AOL users from these lists, and both were really cool people who have just been using AOL since time immemorial.

Under this scheme we have two choices:
1) Ignore it and risk these users losing their messages as spam (which is the most likely choice).
2) Cut off all our AOL users.
3) Make someone eat the stick to pay for them to get messages.

It's not a thing that we should be "made to pay for." We're already paying our mail providers (either directly or through ad views), and we're doing no harm, but in your view we're equivalent to spammers. Just because you use the internet differently doesn't mean that everyone else who does things differently should be screwed.

Re:Open-letter petition to AOL

[A Commentor]

We should all configure our MTAs (Sendmail, Postfix, etc.) to refuse to deliver ANY email to AOL hosts. When AOL customers can't get email from outside AOL, they will switch to a more enlightened ISP.

What you need to add is a block FROM the aol.com domain. When the AOL members see that all mail they send to anyone outside of AOL is returned 'undeliverable', they are more likely to complain.

Slippery Slope

[iamlucky13]

What bugs me about the email tax, and I'm sorry to fall back on a cliche debate term, there's some definite slippery slope potential. For now those who pay bypass the filter. A lot of spam still gets through these filters, however, so the next obvious step is to add more rules to the filters. Pretty soon, as you proposed, the only way to send email is to pay your 0.1 cent, but since spam filters are generally pretty good about filtering out bot spam, paying to pass the filters actually could increase their success rate at getting into people's inboxes to the point where it's worth paying that tiny fee. More so for hand-crafted spam, which obviously accumulates slower.

And I'd wager there would be no cost savings from your ISP. The extra layer of billing penny fractions to billions of email accounts, even handled as a tree structure (consumer 1 > mail provider 1 > mail provider 2; consumer 2 > mail provider 2 > mail provider 1...back and forth ad infinitum), would eat up all the revenue.

No, it's not sinister, but it's misguided. I'm counting on the consumers to weed this one out. AOL has further decreased the likelihood of me every subscribing to their services with this move.

Re:IT'S NOT A TAX, ya idiots.

[Krach42]

Main Entry: tax
Function: noun
Usage: often attributive
1 a : a charge usually of money imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes b : a sum levied on members of an organization to defray expenses

http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary [merriam-webster.com]

I'm sorry, I was under the assumption that AOL was an authority, and that they were imposing a charge of money to access their otherwise public service.

Of course, the 1b definition fits even without me being facetious.

Now, I'll thank you for hijacking a +5: Funny thread just because it's the first post to the article, simply because you're afraid that if it's any deeper into the comment tree no one will see it, or care about it.