Opposition to AOL's 'Email Tax' Growing 164
An anonymous reader writes "The Register is reporting that opposition to AOL's proposed 'Email Tax' that would create a two tier email filtering system is growing.
DearAOL.com, representing such organisations as the EFF and Craigslist, has written an open letter to AOL asking them to reconsider. "
Certified Spam (Score:1, Insightful)
This system would create a two-tiered Internet in which affluent mass emailers could pay AOL a fee that amounts to an "email tax" for every email sent, in return for a guarantee that such messages would bypass spam filters and go directly to AOL members' inboxes
So this wouldn't stop spam, it would just help AOL profit off of it. Companies that do spam will be weighing out their average gains against the cost of sending mass emails, and I'm sure many will decide it's worth it. I'm sure they would be thr
Re:Certified Spam (Score:2)
Sure this wouldn't stop real companies with real mailing addresses and real marketing budgets from spamming us. It would stop the zombies.
What % of our spam is "reputable" companies trying to shill us stuff and what part is zombie networks shilling h/e/r/b/i/a/l v/i/a/g/r/a? I would guess something like 85% total crap and 15% junk mail. If my spam volume went down by 85%, I wouldn't mind.
Moveon.org and the rest complain because now a mass mailing of 1 m
Re:Certified Spam (Score:2)
Re:Certified Spam (Score:2)
I've seen many systems stop a large percentage of spam that also have a low rate of false positives. However a low rate is not good enough. One false positive is enough for me to worry about missing an important email.
Re:Certified Spam (Score:1)
Re:Certified Spam (Score:3, Insightful)
So you don't care, even if it means legitimate emails don't get through?
What this means is AOL can look for any large volume of nearly identical messages and move them straight to the spam bucket. That means not-for-profit mailing lists. Think the linux kernel mailing list, mysql-users and hundreds or thousands of other lists, large and small.
Sure, spam volume for AOL users will decrease dramatically, but at what cost?
There are lots of very effective a
Re:Certified Spam (Score:2, Funny)
Yeah, im sure lots of people who uses AOL as their ISP subscribe to LKML and database lists....
Re:Certified Spam (Score:2)
I guess AOL folk don't belong to any of those either...
Re:Certified Spam (Score:1)
How would this reduce ads for V|aGRa and "st0ck updates"? If these break through spam filers already, then they will still break through the spam filter now. And if the spam filter blocked them before, it will still block them now. As far as I can tell all this does is let paying companies bypass the spam filter. This only means more spam in the inbox, not less. Their spam filter will not suddenly become stronger, and it won't suddenly put fear into
Re:Certified Spam (Score:2)
They don't have spam filters. OTOH with the tax, they will be able to buy some. Genius
Re:Certified Spam (Score:1)
The reason they are supposedly charging now to get direct access through the spam blocker (which is BS anyway..any company which is mass mailing is a spammer, zombie or not, and ought to be stopped) is to help keep the spam lists up to date. So the argument is "oh woe, we don't make enough money to keep one of our primary services up to date".
Fucking bullshit, man. So what if AOL profits? They'r
moveon.org has a bad reputation (Score:2)
Re:Certified Spam (Score:2)
I don't think a lot of companies will buy into it either. I don't have any statistics, but there are millions of e-mail addresses that don't have @aol.com on them. I'm also sure aol users probably have other address at yahoo and hotmail where they can
Re:Certified Spam (Score:2)
Why do you have to charge a fee for the services you provide?
Can't they set up some kind of certification system...[?]
Last time I checked, "setting up" and "systems" involves time, effort, and material resources; i.e., it costs money. Sounds like a job for Fee-Charging Guy to me.
This just looks like a way for AOL to make $$$.
It's not "just" a way to make money. It's a way to make money by investing some of your resources to provide a service people want at a price t
Re:Certified Spam (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:Certified Spam (Score:2, Insightful)
But this will take out a huge chunk of spammers. The reason spam is an effective business model is because it is so very cheap. A big spam campaign can reach a million people. If ISPs charged just 1 cent per email, that campaign goes from within epsilon of
Re:Certified Spam (Score:2)
Re:Certified Spam (Score:2)
How? Maybe I'm missing something, but it looks to me as if any spam that can get through their filters now will continue to get through -- in addition to the mailings from companies that pay the fee to get their mail passed on through.
Re:Certified Spam (Score:2)
Computers are logical, humans are not. A majority of humans logic abilities and intelligence halves in front of a computer. (The same goes with mobile phones I guess).
Would anybody drive a car if it crashed as often as a computer? A calculator? A TV? Nope.
Try explaining email forwarding to someone who has moved and filed a change of address and never got their mail, but they don't trust or
Re:Certified Spam (Score:2)
Mmmmhmm. What about legitimate mailing lists then?
Re:Certified Spam (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Certified Spam (Score:2)
Re:Certified Spam (Score:2)
Re:Certified Spam (Score:2)
Re:Certified Spam (Score:3, Interesting)
Now if my ISP were to use this money for purposes other than lowering my bill - or perhaps inc
Re:Certified Spam (Score:1)
COUNTER VIEW: It's a great idea (Score:2, Insightful)
The idea of charging for a resource you have already paid for in other ways or is otherwise free is an almost universally accepted concept in ecomonics as the best way, on a large scale, to avoid the trajedy of th
Re:COUNTER VIEW: It's a great idea (Score:2)
What do we do when someone signs up for several mailing lists and maliciously marks it as spam? There's going to be a lot of overhead involved in handling those sorts of situations.
Re:Charity spam is still spam (Score:2)
Signing up for a mailing list makes it, pretty much by definition, not spam...
Things have changed, then. (Score:1)
Pity.
Re:Things have changed, then. (Score:2)
For those of us that run services on the net however; no matter our opnion of AOL users they do represent a large slice of internet users. Regaurdless of how dumb we may precieve them to be thier money is still green. If an AOL user uses my site/service and part of that service offering includes e-mail updates the AOL user excpets those updates to work. If the person providing the service does not pay the
It's a nice thought (Score:2)
Re:It's a nice thought (Score:2, Insightful)
somewhat larger than the article makes it sound... (Score:4, Informative)
In total this coalition has more than 15 million people in it according to USA Today.
BTW, AOL just announced that it is going to be raising its general monthly fee as well. Either they will drop this e-mail tax crap or they will lose those idiots who are still subscribed to their "internet" service
Re:somewhat larger than the article makes it sound (Score:1)
Abandon An Online Lackey (Score:2)
Captain! Abandon ship, the spam is coming in droves and cannot be stopped!
Yahoo! Here we goooo...
AOL is shrinking into obscurity (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure that for most companies, the proportion of their customers who have aol.com email addresses is dropping each year. As long as this idea does not catch hold in the growing domains like hotmail and gmail then we can just laugh as AOL gets more and more desparate to find a new angle for growth. This is not that angle.
I own a forum with 8000 members (Score:2)
Out of 8,150 total users 1,007 have AOL e-mail addresses.
That is almost 12.5% !!!!
I don't think that people like me can just simply "ignore" 12.5% of our user base!
When that number drops below 5% it might be possible. Until then (and I believe it is well on it's way) we all have to deal with it.
How about the world charge AOL (Score:1)
Re:How about the world charge AOL (Score:1)
Re:How about the world charge AOL (Score:2)
What kind of business model is this? (Score:1)
Seriously, who do they have in charge over there? Is he drunk or something?
Nope, just a moron (Score:2)
I though thte onl;y reason anyone signed up in the first place was because they knew it was an easy way to get online?
AOL really are trying their damnedest to screw themselves over by the looks of things.
Re:What kind of business model is this? (Score:1)
Why would they change their minds (Score:2)
AOL have several good reasons to introduce the 'E-mail' tax and very few not to. The reasons for are
Re:Why would they change their minds (Score:1)
1. They might piss off some people they don't care about
Ah, like their customers?
Re:Why would they change their minds (Score:2)
Re:Why would they change their minds (Score:1)
You know there is a business plan in there... (Score:1, Redundant)
Based on the antics of megacorps like AOL and Bell South. It goes like this:
1. Invest large amounts of $$$ into dark fiber to create independent network.
2. Advertise your service as: the last truly free (as in speech) Internet.
(no DRM, no censorship, no [bittorrent|skype|other] filtering, no stupid ideas... EVER!)
3. ???
4. Profit!
I believe step 3 has something to do with advertising on Slashdot, but I am not sure.
Step 2 could also be named: "We have common carrier status and we want to keep
Re:You know there is a business plan in there... (Score:2)
2. Advertise your service as: the last truly free (as in speech) Internet. (no DRM, no censorship, no [bittorrent|skype|other] filtering, no stupid ideas... EVER!)
3. ???
4. Profit!
I believe step 3 has something to do with advertising on Slashdot, but I am not sure.
* ring ring. ring ring. *
Hey, Sergey? Yeah, hi. It's me, Larry. Got an idea for you. Yeah. All that dark fibre. Yeah. And that crap Bellsouth's been trying on lat
Bypassing? (Score:1)
Re:Bypassing? (Score:2)
The trouble is that many people with small mailing lists find that if one of their recipients (or perhaps competitors) complains - then AOL marks them as spam. I send out a newsletter on the second wednesday of every month telling clients to verify the
Re:Bypassing? (Score:2)
The last time this story was mentioned I checked out the details. Unapproved mail, even if not marked spam, will be delivered, but HTML links, to images say, will be inoperative. The spammers who pay will have their mail delivered in all their multimedia glory.
Re:Bypassing? (Score:1)
If however AOL are going to use some kind of filter to decided if its spam or otherwise why not just block the spam there and then.
This also leads on to the thought, if spammers are paying AOL to let spam through which is what effectively they would be
Re:Bypassing? (Score:2)
Re:Bypassing? (Score:2)
I run a small (Score:2)
These suddenly started to bounce back from AOL. I went through hell trying to convince them to remove me from their spam filter - I really didn't consider one email sent it reponse to a 'click for email validation' button to make me a spammer - but AOL did (quick check showed over 2 years I'd sent about 150 emails to 150 unique AOL accounts).
I guess I could pay t
Great (Score:1)
AOHell (Score:1)
Re:AOHell (Score:2)
No. In this particular case, AOL is trying to cover the costs of creating and maintaining the infrastructure which treats some emails specially. If you go to AOL and say "Hey, I want to be able to bypass your spam filters and save you bandwidth by running a server at your colocation" they'll laugh in your face. If, on the other hand, you say the same thing and add "Oh, and I'll pay you for each email AND I'll pre-vet senders AND monitor spam complaint
Re:AOHell (Score:1)
AOL's profit motive will fail (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:AOL's profit motive will fail (Score:2)
If AOL users were the type to do that, they'd have done so already. This will succeed. I know too many AOL users.
Countermeasures (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Countermeasures (Score:2)
Disclaimer: I have consulted for Goodmail Systems, and have PROFITED from their EVIL plan to TAKE OVER the world, Pinky!
Why are people bothering... (Score:2)
If you don't want to pay the "tax", don't! (Score:2)
-russ
Re:If you don't want to pay the "tax", don't! (Score:4, Interesting)
Yahoo is already trying to make this tax explicit [cnn.com]:
Service (Score:2)
I run a double opt-in mailing list (they sign up, they receive confirmation, they confirm, THEN they get email) for Classic (75-79) Honda Goldwings. We have AOL members on the list, and we will NOT pay any kind of tax. We'll just tell the users (before AOL goes to this "Tax") tha
show me the money (Score:2)
Who ever said that a form of communication was free, either in people's effort expended to send/receive the messages, or the cost of hardware to carry the messages? We all pay right now (implicitly) for the cost of keeping massive amounts of storage around for all this junk we get every day. If someone can come up with a workable system to tack 0.1 cent on every message that causes people (and spammers) to more carefully
TANSTAAFL! (Score:3, Insightful)
We've all become spoiled with free email on the internet, but when you think about it, there's no more right to free email than there is to free postal service. And as we have all seen, free email is probably the primary culprit in the rise of spam and many of its associated ills. So it is likely that anything that imposes additional costs on spamming will have some reducing effect on the overall volume of email. No, it won't kill all spam, but it will likely be enough of a barrier to some portion of small time operators and n00b phishers. And the bulk mail that one does get will have a greater probability of being from a legitimate source.
Free email isn't likely to disappear anytime soon. It is still a good marketing tool for those that provide it and a gateway to their other premium services. But I hope that the days of being able to send thousands and thousands of emails at no cost are coming to an end.
Re:TANSTAAFL! (Score:2)
It isn't. This is why I am paying a monthly subscription fee to my ISP.
Re:TANSTAAFL! (Score:2)
The recipient must pay the cost to receive/store them. If a spammer sends you 1000 10MB messages in one day, should your ISP charge you to keep these on their server? Right now you have no way to prevent someone from sending you massive amounts of useless email. If ISP's started to assess fines for any accounts that exceeded a maximum bandwidth/data transfer, then users would
Re:TANSTAAFL! (Score:2)
Of course, it won't work because spammers won't pay AOL a dime. Why should they? If they wanted to PAY for advertising they'd use conventional web ads, they're using spam because it's C
Re:Email is free... (Score:2)
Turn it around on AOL (Score:2)
This can be looked at by turning the tables against AOL.
When SBC wanted to charge Google for "using their bandwidth for free", I always thought Google's response could have been, "If your ISP is throttling the connection you're paying for, here's a list of ISPs that give you what you're paying for."
I wonder if this can be turned around on AOL by saying if you sign-up for their service, they won't let our emails through. If this is not okay with you, here's a list of service providers that provide you
Turn it around on AOL - Iffy Strategy (Score:2)
A serious slow down to Google could ruin it particularly if they use the strategy I expect them to. SBC o
Excellent quote in CNN article! (Score:2)
"There is no substantive news here, just because some disparate groups of advocates have come together for an event reminiscent of the bar scene in the first 'Star Wars' movie." -- AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham
(article at http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/02/28/email. rebellion.ap/index.html [cnn.com])
They start charging - I start blocking (Score:2)
Blacklist all of AOL - you cut US off, we cut YOU off
No problem - I've looked through my address book, and there is very little traffic I want from AOL anyway
I'll laugh when... (Score:1)
...Spammers find a way to charge AOL user accounts for the spam they will undoubtedly send.
spam sucks. (Score:2)
Fortunately a lot of this gets axed with the greylisting and rbl's so I am not having to accept the full message (bandwidth + cpu processing). Even trying to be conservative, there are false positives as well as spa
Let the market correct itself. (Score:2)
If these problem return customers will simply move to alternate providers. That's how it works. The service provider field is already
who cares (Score:2)
LET THEM!!1! (Score:2, Interesting)
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."
- Napoleon Bonaparte
Re:LET THEM!!1! (Score:2)
- Napoleon Bonaparte"
I loved that movie, Pedro was the best!
I think it's a great idea (Score:2)
No one wants to pay for something when they can have it for free.
"Bonded Spammer" was a flop. This will be, too. (Score:2)
I divert Bonded Spammer mail to a separate folder. Let's see what's in there:
Mostly harmless (Score:2)
In the end, for the average user the spam level is probably reduced and companies stupid enough to pay AOL for the right to spam will have less money left to spend it on other annoying schemes.
The only bitter aftertaste left is, th
Stop complaining..... (Score:3, Informative)
The better response is to make it absolutely, brilliantly clear that your service doesn't support AOL.
Stick a "Doesn't support AOL" banner on your website, put up a link saying, "AOL's mailservers no longer support the advanced technology used by the rest of the industry. Please upgrade to MSN, Yahoo, Gmail, or any of the other, reliable free e-mail providers out there. If you have any questions or concerns please direct them to or
Better yet, some one like hotmail or gmail should hop on this train and start a "switch from AOL campaign." What better way to grab users then to scare them off using _valid_ scare tactics?
We don't do business with any AOL users (just checked). The only AOL e-mail I have to deal with is one of our co-worker's private accounts. If he can no longer receive company e-mails, I'll laugh at him.
Hell, even if you do have a billion AOL customers, subscribe to this service for the SHORT-TERM only. Send each and everyone of your customers a nastygram every 2 weeks indicating that you are dropping AOL support, because their "outdated e-mail technology is no longer compatible with the rest of the web." Most people using AOL have had it forever; it won't take much to convince them AOL is ancient. Advise them to switch to an "up and coming" service like Gmail, and they'll switch, at least for your business related e-mails.
A wide variety of companies used to do this with all kinds of services. Internet Explorer, Active X, even AOL and internet access (back when AOL offered nothing but proxys). The key is not where the blame actually lies (AOL's supposed fight with spam), but to instead portray AOL as a white elephant that is no longer keeping up with the times.
Reminds me of the explicit lyrics (Score:2)
Now this situation. The intent may have been to limit spam, but it seems to encourage it mor
... In Other News ... (Score:2)
When asked their opinion on the matter, several radio and television owners were baffled that this was even an issue. Said citizen
Problem? What problem? (Score:2)
Oh for goodness' sake! (Score:2)
Only, it's not. (Score:2)
I've read the specs, I've talked to the people, and I do not believe the hype; this is not a "tax on email". It never was.
Tiered Email subscriptions too? (Score:2)
Maybe this will finally alert AOL-users to just what a crock of $#!+ their service really is.
Re:Who Cares? (Score:2)
Re:Who Cares? (Score:2)
Re:Who Cares? (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:GOOD (Score:2)
If this goes through and people start complaining they can't
If you were AOL (Score:2)
Join AOL, and get GUARANTEED spam! Or get a Gmail account and have it all filtered.
Many moons ago, Borland and Ashton-Tate and WordPerfect were all legitimate competitors to Microsoft. They made a progression of dumb decisions and Microsoft made smart ones. History repeats, with Google in the Microsoft spot and AOl as Ashton-Tate.