E-mail charging plan

[GwydionM]

AOL and Yahoo plan to charge fees of up to one cent (US) per message to those that sign up for the service.

Paying the fees means that messages will not go through spam filters, are guaranteed to arrive and will bear a stamp of authenticity.

I think it's a sensible idea. The only way to beat spam, in the long run.

It will also make it economical for more-targetted 'junk mail' - one recipient in a thousand may buy, to make it economic, something like that.

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An old man who lives in the UK

 

[GwydionM]

Here is the full link - a BBC story.

------------------------------
An old man who lives in the UK

 

[Sheco]

So the ISPs will use authenticated spam as a source of revenue. Nice.

 

[philhege]

UCE is UCE. The operative modifier is "unsolicited". They're sending me stuff I don't want and didn't ask for.

All I can say is thank God for Mailsweeper and whitelists. They're the sh*tcan for the twenty-first century.

Phil Hegedusich
Senior Programmer/Analyst
IIMAK

http://www.iimak.com

-----------
Eschewing obfuscation diurnally.

 

[Spirit]

It'll take spammer about 5 days to figure out how to add the AOL Approved Sender header in the mail rendering this useless.

regards,
Iain

 

[LadySlinger]

You know, I don't publish my email address all over the internet, I make sure I uncheck the "Yes I want to receive information" when I sign up on web sites and finally I don't use AOL. Per day, I *maybe* receive 10 JunkMails a day.

It'll take me a while before I start paying per emails because of the reasons mentioned above by Spirit, philhege and Sheco. Once Yahoo! and AOL can prove that their new technology works, I'll pay for the service.

 

[BocaBurger]

I have had the same concast e-mail adress for quite a few years. Spammers seem to send e-mails to every combination of letters @comcast.net.
Example: If you are jsmith@comcast.net, you will see e-mails where the CC includes asmith, bsmith, csmith, aasmith, absmith, etc.
I don't know how comcast's servers can handle the load of crap that must hit their network.



BocaBurger
<===========================||////////////////|0
The pen is mightier than the sword, but the sword hurts more!

 

[langleymass]

They are just going to annoy people. I hope it kills AOL. Yahoo is also losing out to Gmail big time.

 

[kHz]

I have a yahoo account and rarely receive any spam. However, on my ISP broadband account it is hit with spam constantly. Go figure that one!

 

[Sheco]

ISPs actually don't mind spam. It will help them later when they start pushing everyone to sign up for Internet 2.0

 

[AnotherHiggins]

It'll take me a while before I start paying per emails

They're going to change mass-mailers, not you and me (so far, anyway).

I can kinda see the appeal for a Joe Shmoe, non computer-literate user.... Let's say Joe gets an email from PayPal. It looks very official. It says that there has been some unusual activity on his account and urges him to follow a link to 'change' his password. This requires him to enter his old password.

It might be nice if the email had a seal of authenticity from Joe's ISP - or, more to the point, if it didn't. I don't think this will do a thing to curb spam, but it might help curb phishing.

Then again, Spirit is probably right. "It'll take spammer about 5 days to figure out how to add the AOL Approved Sender header in the mail rendering this useless".

[tt]_____
[blue]-John[/blue][/tt]
[tab][red]The plural of anecdote is not data[/red]

Help us help you. Please read FAQ181-2886 before posting.

 

[langleymass]

I get tons of spam at my Yahoo, in spite of the fact that I have NEVER given it out.

 

[langleymass]

I don't remember getting any spam on Gmail in about a year.

 

[Sympology]

All those that get Spam in Yahoo, hotmai etc...have you turned on your spam filters? I get the odd amount but nothing major.

That said, this certificate thing could be a great idea. I look for the cert and bang, block it. That way even less marketing crap gets through!

Stu..

Only the truly stupid believe they know everything.
Stu.. 2004

 

[JABOSL]

Some accounts seem to get slammed and some get nothing. My current business and personal addresses don't get but one a month or so and I'm not talking about it being stopped by spam filtering. It doens't come.

I have had accounts that did get lots of spam. One particually bad one was a yahoo acount I had years ago. I abandoned the account. 2 years later I decided to sign up for that name again just like I hadn't had it before. Yahoo listed it as available and I got it but guess what. The spam was just as strong as it had ever been. Again I abandoned the account.

I gave out my work email address on a google programming group once a few months ago and within an hour I was hit with resume's! I quickly went and changed my email address and thankfully I haven't gotten any more since.

On a past occasion where I had spam problems I found Thunderbird handled the spam excellent and if I start getting it again it's nice to know Thunderbird will take care of it. So spam really doesn't bother me but I'd hate to have a kid getting some of the crap I get and I do find some of the scams pretty believable so I'm sure they get some folks.

 

[dilettante]

Sometimes I think we need an email system that requires a simple form of authentication for incoming messages.

The thing that occurs to me right now is a sort of "token dispenser" function. The tokens could be text strings of modest length (maybe 20 to 30 characters) and pseudorandom. Maybe limited to upper and lowercase letters and digits.

I'm sort of picturing two types of tokens: "permanent" ones that work forever until deleted from your mail client's "token store" and "temporary" ones that expire after they are used for some small number (3? 5?) of emails.

If you want to correspond with somebody you give them an access token as well as your email address. The temporary ones autoexpire as they get used up, the others can be deleted by you whenever you choose - then you can generate new ones.

In turn, email clients could store tokens along with addresses in address books for your outgoing mail.

For those you correspond with regularly, you'd give out one of your "permanent" tokens. If you suspect that a spammer has compromised somebody's addressbook just delete your permanent tokens and create new ones. You might only have one or a very few permtokens at any one time.

The mail clients could be created to track who you've disclosed permtokens to. When you create a new one to replace an old one, maybe autofire special emails out to everyone on that list. Those emails could be recognized by the receiving clients (special email header?) to autoupdate the addressbooks at their end.

When you buy something online, maybe generate a new temptoken and provide that. This lets the merchant give you order updates and such, but limits the value of your address/temptoken pair for resale to spammers and for that matter an endless series of sales pitches and "specials this week" emails.

The two types could be made indistinguishable, so if you did a lot of business with somebody you could always give them a permtoken. Maybe make the list of permtokens and associated list of correspondents have a sort of "revokeability." I.E. if you don't want to talk to them (get emails from them) anymore, just take them off the list for that permtoken before regenerating it.

Mails coming in with expired or bogus tokens could be blackholed or bounced.

I admit I haven't thought it all through... and I've probably expressed the idea clumsily here. Does this sound at all practical though? Seems better than any "pay for play" 2-tiered email system to me. It probably has some gaping holes I haven't thought through.

We might need a "sync" functionality for those who use multiple email clients (on several machines).

 

[langleymass]

Most of my Yahoo spam goes into a spam folder. Is that what you mean by a spam filter?