Opposition to AOL's 'Email Tax' Growing

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. "

It's a nice thought

[deadgoon42 (309575)]

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.

somewhat larger than the article makes it sound...

[cyberbob2010 (312049)]

"... 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

Abandon An Online Lackey

[digitaldc (879047)]

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

[cryfreedomlove (929828)]

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.

Why would they change their minds

[Silver Sloth (770927)]

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

[G4from128k (686170)]

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

TANSTAAFL!

[blueZhift (652272)]

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.

Stop complaining.....

[WhiteWolf666 (145211)]

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.

Re:Certified Spam

[ednopantz (467288)]

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

Re:Certified Spam

[CastrTroy (595695)]

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.

Re:Certified Spam

[Albanach (527650)]

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

Re:Certified Spam

[rainbowfyre (175300)]

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

Re:Certified Spam

[BenjyD (316700)]

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.

Re:Certified Spam

[Secret Agent X23 (760764)]

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.

Re:Certified Spam

[SCHecklerX (229973)]

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).

Re:Certified Spam

[DistantShadow (901883)]

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

Re:Charity spam is still spam

[EvanED (569694)]

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...

Re:Who Cares?

[Jason1729 (561790)]

Both options sound good. I'm not sure which is better...but I don't really care.

Nope, just a moron

[Nursie (632944)]

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.

Re:Bypassing?

[amcdiarmid (856796)]

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

Re:Bypassing?

[1u3hr (530656)]

'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.

Re:Things have changed, then.

[Manitcor (218753)]

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

Re:You know there is a business plan in there...

[meringuoid (568297)]

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

Re:AOL's profit motive will fail

[m50d (797211)]

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.

Re:If you don't want to pay the "tax", don't!

[tessaiga (697968)]

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.