according to NYTimes,
America Online and Yahoo, two of the world’s largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered.
read the original report here.
that’s a bold move that may cause other problems.
according to the report, this special treatment includes “go straight to users’ main mailboxes, and will not have to pass the gantlet of spam filters that could divert them to a junk-mail folder or strip them of images and Web links.” but isn’t that what would happen exactly when you send a legitimate email (except that it would go through spam filters)?
how would they justify the fees when people have been sending emails with no problem for free? i’m talking about legitimate emails here, not spams. when i send emails to my friends that use AOL or Yahoo email addresses, they should reach their inboxes without delay, as long as i’m not spamming.
if my emails get filtered to junk mail folder or completely filtered out, it’s their spam filter’s fault, not mine. how would they convince me to pay when THEIR system is malfunctioning?
more interestingly, what would happen to unpaid emails when the postage system is put into place? get delivered as usual? then back to point above, why should i pay? go through more filters so that some of legitimate emails must be filtered out in order to show how important the postage is? that’s simply not right. if that happens, i would expect people dropping their AOL or Yahoo address.
a bigger concern is, will it solve spam issue? most likely no. in offline world, postage is more expensive, yet we receive ads, mail order, catolog, etc. daily in letterbox. if by paying postage, emails will be guaranteed to be delivered bypassing spam filter, tons of spammers would start paying and get their spam emails delivered.
spams are still spams. spam emails would not become legitimate because they’re paid.
i guess their logic is, spammers would not pay because they are spammers. but my logic is, spammers do not spam for the sake of spam. they do it for profit. as long as there’s profit, why not pay for the postage? if they cannot afford “1/4 of a cent to a penny” for a guaranteed reader, they are in wrong business.
what if someone pay and send phishing email?
Paying senders will be assured that their messages will be delivered to AOL users’ main in-boxes and marked as “AOL Certified E-Mail.”
some really unfortunate thing may happen then.
of course, it would reduce the number of spams for sure. if snail mail is free, people would find hundreds of ads in mailbox everyday instead of a few.