Yahoo, AOL to Charge Some E-Mail Senders

Original article found here

Ok.. lets see how many other people find this rediculous. First, selling out to China, now SELLING to spammers!

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Yahoo and AOL plan to introduce a service that would charge senders a fee to route their e-mail directly to a user's mailbox without first passing through junk mail filters

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Who would use such a service? Marketers/Advertisers/spammers maybe?

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The fees, which would range from 1/4 cent to 1 cent per e-mail....

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As someone else put it, thats cheaper than sending junk via snail mail!

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e-mail senders will be guaranteed their messages won't be filtered and will bear a seal alerting recipients they're legitimate.

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Legitimate.......... spam??
Not to mention... what happens when these spammers include malicious scripts,html, or other payloads (spyware/malware)?

Alun Jones (MS Security guru) writes:

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Let me get this straight... if I'm one of your customers, you're going to sell access to my inbox, to anyone who has my address, allowing them to bypass the spam filters that would normally have kept them out of it, and this is to "weed out ... spam"?

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HAHA!! aye aye aye... well... never did like AOL in the first place, but it looks like its Hasta Luego to my Yahoo account.

Oh... but it gets better

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AOL and Yahoo would get a cut of the fees charged by Goodmail

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Umm... would this fall under the "shooting ones self in the foot" category?
Hey AOL and YAHOO, you are already second and well... fifth or sixth place to google...
is that not far enough behind?

Hi,
I think there was something you missed in the article. It says that the advertisers will only be able to send to people who already have agreed to receive emails from them. Also, it seems the "seal" they were talking about would help to fight phishing attacks.

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...in exchange for a payment and a pledge to contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages...

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Point taken. However, I am curious how that would be implemented. Like many other online services, when you initially sign up for an account, many options come enabled by default unless you go into the privacy settings and manually disable them. Or (and I know this is not an excuse) when signing up with a new service, there are several check boxes which are checked by default and rely on the user to uncheck them before proceeding. Many people seemingly are oblivious to the extra settings/options when signing up.

Granted, we don't even know how this program will be deployed. But I hardly imagine many people will willingly participate to receiving ad's.

But of course they agreed to us sending them spam. They have never contacted us, visited us, or otherwise said anything to us....and by our terms of service that implies their agreement to allow us to send them email.

If they really don't want the spam they can always click our opt out link and verify that it is a valid address for us anyways.