Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

Opposition to AOL's 'Email Tax' Growing

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wed Mar 01, 2006 09:19 AM
from the i'm-still-undecided dept.
America Online
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. "
+ -
story

Related Stories

[+] AOL Won't Budge on Email Tax 277 comments
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.'"
[+] IT: Certified Email Not Here to Reduce Spam 197 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Goodmail CEO Richard Gingras surprised Legislators and advocacy groups today when he announced that the CertifiedMail program being implemented by AOL and Yahoo is not meant to reduce spam. Rather than helping to reduce spam Gingras claimed that the point is to allow users to verify who important messages are really from, like a message from your bank or credit card company."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Opposition to AOL's 'Email Tax' Growing 50 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.
  • I suppose that it is nice that these people are looking out for AOL user's best interest, but I doubt it will have any significant impact. It is obvious from their shrinking membership that AOL doesn't have a clue as to what their users want. I don't have anything against AOL, but I also don't see what they are offering to make their service any better than other, much cheaper services. Additional SPAM for their customers doesn't make things any better. I'm convinced that AOL is trying to kill itself.
    • If AOL goes through with this, I'll just scrub all AOL email addresses from my mailing lists. If AOL subscribers complain, I'll tell them to complain to AOL, not me. I'll also tell them if they want back on the list(s), switch to a provider with a clue.
  • "... representing such organisations as the EFF and Craigslist... "

    ...and Moveon.org and the Gun Owners of America, and Civic Action, and the Cancer Online Resources etc...

    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
  • A pay-to-send system won't help the fight against spam - in fact, this plan assumes that spam will continue and that mass mailers will be willing to pay to have their emails bypass spam filters. And non-paying spammers will not reduce the amount of mail they throw at your filters simply because others pay to evade them.

    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)

    by cryfreedomlove (929828) on Wednesday March 01 2006, @09:29AM (#14826115)
    Who cares what AOL does anymore?

    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.

  • AOL have several good reasons to introduce the 'E-mail' tax and very few not to. The reasons for are

    1. Increased profits
    2. The can say to 'mom and pop' users, their biggest user base, that they're trying to do something about spam.
    3. Increased profits
    The reasons against are
    1. They might piss off some people they don't care about
    2. Er....
    I don't see this as the most difficult decision they're going to make.

  • Countermeasures (Score:3, Insightful)

    by G4from128k (686170) on Wednesday March 01 2006, @09:51AM (#14826273)
    1. Publish AOL's tech support numbers -- tell AOL users to call to complain (should cost AOL at least $5 a call)
    2. Charge AOL members to join emailed lists
    3. Stop accepting AOL addresses as legitimate email addresses
    • You are assuming that AOL will be allowing spam-for-pay. Your assumption is incorrect. This is instead one company (Goodmail Systems) asserting to AOL "This email is good. As evidence I have charged the sender, and as evidence I am paying you per email a fee sufficient to cover your cost for verifying my evidence."

      Disclaimer: I have consulted for Goodmail Systems, and have PROFITED from their EVIL plan to TAKE OVER the world, Pinky!
  • This is one way AOL will finally wither and die. When people start realizing that it will cost more to send/receive emails to users on AOL, they will finally stop accessing those accounts for email thereby reducing the number of subscribers. Sure, it will take a while for this to actually happen, but don't give up hope.
  • If you don't want to pay the "tax", don't! And then see what penalty you have to pay. The penalty is that your email has to be filtered for spam -- which is exactly what is happening now. So why is the "tax" a bad thing?
    -russ

    • Re:If you don't want to pay the "tax", don't! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by tessaiga (697968) on Wednesday March 01 2006, @10:23AM (#14826476)
      Because AOL will now be able to lower the threshold for spam flagging and increase their false positive rate. Services like electronic bank statements are going to be among the first to be adversely affected, forcing banks and the like to pay the "tax" you mention to continue to offer these services. After all, when Joe Sixpack's electronic statements stop showing up in his inbox, who do you think he's going to call up, AOL or his bank? AOL is counting on it simply being cheaper for companies to cough up money for their fees than to pay for additional customer service reps to educate each caller on the real source of the problem.

      Yahoo is already trying to make this tax explicit [cnn.com]:

      Another major provider, Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo Inc., in the coming months will test an optional certified e-mail program based on "transactional" messages only, such as bank statements and purchase receipts, Yahoo spokeswoman Karen Mahon said.
  • It's not like AOL already doesn't block access to things on the Internet they deem unacceptable. Even things that are completely legal in all sense of the word, they decide to block. You just get a "Page could not be displayed".

    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
  • boo hoo. non-profit people having to pay to send out messages?? cry me a river.

    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)

    by blueZhift (652272) on Wednesday March 01 2006, @10:26AM (#14826498) Homepage Journal
    Sorry to rain on the parade, but there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. I'm sorry that AOL's (and others) plans to impose email charges on bulk mailers is going to raise the costs of some respectable charities and other nonprofits. But, the last time I bothered to check, sending bulk mail via the postal service was not free. So why should sending bulk mail over the internet be any different?

    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.

  • 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

  • "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])

  • It's really quite simple for me

    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
  • Spam sucks. The amount of spam I need to filter on a daily basis for my not-so-well-known domains is huge (40-50% of all incoming email). I make it manageable with the use of greylisting, realtime black lists, enforcement of correct smtp handshakes, content filters, virus filters, yada yada yada.

    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
  • AOL obstensibly became spam crusaders when it cut into their bottom line. What was the #1 thing their users complained about two years ago? First most, pop-up and banner ads on AOL's sign-in screens--and secondly, the volume of spam had increased exponentially over the years. This poll was taken because the amount of customers leaving AOL were significant and measurable.

    If these problem return customers will simply move to alternate providers. That's how it works. The service provider field is already
  • I don't see what the big deal is. At this point my feelings about AOL subscribers are about the same as my feelings about people who voted for George W. Bush twice. I respect their intrinsic value as human beings, but I can no longer take them seriously as members of society. So who gives a rats ass about what they do or do not receive? Get a better inbox, get a better ISP while you're at it. In other words - in my book AOL subscribers already exist in a lower tier of the already divided internet, and

  • LET THEM!!1! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by rahyl (698660)
    If AOL wants to make a mistake like this, why not just let them? Will it piss off their users when spam starts flowing again? Of course it will! People will leave, case dismissed. Why on earth would the EFF (or anyone else for that matter) want to stop AOL from losing customers?

    "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."
    - Napoleon Bonaparte

  • Stop complaining..... (Score:3, Informative)

    by WhiteWolf666 (145211) <moornblade at gmail.com> on Wednesday March 01 2006, @01:50PM (#14828900) Homepage Journal
    AOL can do whatever it wants. Just ignore it.

    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.
    • So what if AOL profits off of reducing my spam load?

      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
      • But a good filter can do the work. Without giving a back door for companies that have money. I use spam assassin, and It probably catches > 95% of the spam, and in about a year and a half, have only had it block 3 or 4 messages that weren't spam. I get a lot of news letters and emails from companies that I want to get like Nintendo, and all that gets through.

      • So what if AOL profits off of reducing my spam load?

        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

        • Think the linux kernel mailing list, mysql-users and hundreds or thousands of other lists, large and small.

          Yeah, im sure lots of people who uses AOL as their ISP subscribe to LKML and database lists.... :)
      • moveon.org has a bad reputation in the antispam community. They don't process unsubscription requests or bounce messages reliably. They have no one but themselves to blame for this situation. Even if they were to pay Goodmail Systems to send to AOL, complaints would just get them banned from Goodmail Systems. If you send bulk emails, you MUST respect unsubscribes and bounces, or you WILL get banned. RFCs aren't just *Requests* For Comments. They're more like demands.

    • 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 thrilled to know that their emails can bypass spam filters for a few dollars

      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

      • How will allowing people to pay to avoid spam filters reduce spam? The spam filters won't change, all this does is gives AOL an incentive to up the false-positive rate of their spam filters.
      • It won't completely eliminate spam, but it will knock-out the extremely low-response rate "c1a l1z" emails.

        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.

      • Isn't this just making senders pay postage costs? We don't object to that in the real world -- why the outrage now?

        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
    • Not only that, but it will make providing legitimate mailing lists that happen to have a lot of AOL users on them impossible. I have enough problems with AOL's braindead mail server configurations as it is. Now they want me to also pay them for the privilege to deal with their incompetence??? (I run a small ~250 user mail list *FREE OF CHARGE* for my cycling team, many of whom are AOL users).
      • Maybe it's time to simply tell your subscribers that AOL is blocking your mailing list and that you can no longer jump through AOL's hoops. Your subscribers that use AOL have 2 options, either dump AOL or get an account with an e-mail provider.
    • I think I'd be happy if my ISP implemented this so-called "email tax", provided that it was applied directly to lowering my bill. I pay $50 a month - which is about average for cable broadband in the US (in my experience). Anything that lowers my cost is welcome. Plus, I have *never* used my ISP provided email address, so I'd never see a single piece of certified spam from this endeavor. I don't see a downside.

      Now if my ISP were to use this money for purposes other than lowering my bill - or perhaps inc
    • AOL may have implmented it slightly wrong but charging a postage stamp for e-mail is exactly what need to be done. We need some form of micro payment system for sending e-mail. One concept here is that the payment is only collected if the recipient marks the mail as spam, otherwise it's refunded.

      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
      • Where the hell do you get "charity group spam" out of "other legitimate free mailings lists that people sign up for"?

        Signing up for a mailing list makes it, pretty much by definition, not spam...
    • Like the whole "We're no longer going to sell ADSL connections, instead we'll sell "AOL for Broadband" a monthly subscription service you buy on top of net access.

      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.
    • Perhaps, perhaps not: AOL is simply stating that bulk marketers can pay to ensure their mail gets delivered. That mail may be Viagra, or whatever - but if you pay it will go through. AOL will still filter out all the similar junk from people who don't pay.

      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
    • 'legitimate' mailers anyway - Their emails probably aren't designed to circumvent anti-spam filters

      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.

    • Argh. People are being annoyingly stupid about this. More stupid than usual, actually. Here is the problem: people who are sending *desired* *opt-in* email have to bear the cost of constructing their emails so they don't look like spam and don't get caught in AOL's filters. AOL, on the other hand, doesn't benefit from these emails particularly and has no strong incentive to cooperate with senders of legitimate email. It's just another cost to them. If, however, the sender can indicate that their email
    • little bespoke message board thing. When a user signs up it sends them a single email, with a URL they can click to validate their email address.
      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
    • Sure, hen it comes to your typical /. geek that only uses the net for surfing, downloading source, etc.

      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
    • 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.

      * 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

    • When people start to wake up to the fact that they are paying AOL only to be exploited by AOL, they will probably reconsider their subscription...

      If AOL users were the type to do that, they'd have done so already. This will succeed. I know too many AOL users.

    • AOL is trying to cover the costs of bandwidth waste...

      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
    • OK, you can start the ball rolling. Send an invoice to AOL each month for the emails you have received from their servers. Maybe others will join your protest. "The world" isn't a single commercial entity such as AOL.
    • Glad somebody else realized this - let market forces take them down. Customers won't be happy when they don't receive all their email, and I'm sure as hell not going to pay for AOL subscribers to receive mail from me (or from the three rather large mailing lists I moderate). I'm sure most other individuals and mailing lists aren't going to pay, either - just the spammers who want through. Net result, less real mail and more spam to AOLhell land.

      If this goes through and people start complaining they can't
    • You'd be looking to move back into Mom's basement in two years when this scheme further angers their users.

      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.

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2010 Geeknet, Inc.