CYBERSPACE - Two of the largest email providers on the Web reportedly are formulating plans to charge senders who wish to guarantee delivery of rich-media messages to their users.
America Online and Yahoo! say the “virtual postage stamps,” which are expected to cost between one-quarter penny and one cent depending upon volume, will help them identify legitimate messages and block spam, phishing schemes, viruses, and other nasties that end up in users’ inboxes. In addition to paying for delivery, senders must promise to contact only those who have agreed to receive their messages or risk being blocked completely.
Although neither company plans to make payment for delivery mandatory, both say that companies and individuals who pay to have their messages delivered will receive preferential treatment. For example, under AOL’s plan, paid-for messages will not be run through the company’s barrage of spam filters that divert “suspicious” messages to a spam folder in users’ accounts, nor will their messages be subject to having embedded images and links stripped, as may occur with non-paid-for messages. AOL said messages arriving from addresses that its users have added to their address books will pass through unmolested, as they do now.
Critics of the plans deplore both the systems’ costs and potential for mishandling of mail. In addition to charging bulk mailers, AOL and Yahoo! plan to charge senders of individual messages, like order confirmations, retailer sale notices, and newsletters. Some analysts say the process stands as big a chance of angering AOL and Yahoo! customers who might not receive some of their important mail intact as it does of angering senders who may feel their messages are being held for ransom.
“No one wants Goodmail or any other provider to set up a tollbooth that makes it cost-prohibitive for legitimate mailers to reach the inbox,” Matthew Moog, the chief executive of Q Interactive, told the New York Times. Q Interactive owns CoolSavings, a service that sends emails to 10 million subscribers a month. In order to assure email users that its messages are legit, CoolSavings already employs Bonded Sender, a company that verifies the authenticity of email for a flat fee that annually tops out at $20,000 for the highest-volume senders. Moog added that the proposed Goodmail scheme would at least double the cost of an email marketing campaign.
“A big danger is that one of [the senders] will be big enough to encourage AOL users to use a different email service,” Richi Jennings, an analyst at Ferris Research, told the Times.
The revelation by AOL and Yahoo! follows closely on the heels of suggestions by several large cable and telecom providers that the Internet should be “tiered” into different service levels that provide priority services – like the ability to transmit large music and video files – to companies and individuals that pay more than the standard connection and bandwidth fees. It has not escaped notice that AOL is owned by cable giant Time Warner, and Yahoo! has close ties with telecoms AT&T and Verizon.
On Tuesday, the Senate Commerce Committee will conduct a hearing about whether it should consider legislation to ensure “Net neutrality”—in other words, banning Internet access providers from granting preferential treatment to certain content providers. Net neutrality proponents argue that preferential treatment based on how much companies are willing to pay to reach potential customers would make it difficult for smaller companies and organizations to reach existing customers and attract new ones, thereby threatening the open nature of the Internet.
The economics of the proposed “virtual postage” systems certainly concern legitimate marketers of pornography, alcohol, gambling, and tobacco, who balk at the notion that they will be required to pay an additional fee on top of the up to seven cents per address they already pay monthly to “scrub” their mailing lists against “do-not-email” lists maintained by states like Utah and Michigan. Utah and Michigan passed legislation last year that prohibits marketers of products children cannot buy from emailing them about those products, even accidentally, under threat of penalties that include steep fines and jail time. Other states are considering similar legislation.
Like the “do-not-email” lists, AOL’s and Yahoo!’s virtual postage systems will be maintained by a third-party contractor, in this case Goodmail Systems of Mountain View, Calif. Goodmail will collect the electronic postage and verify the identity of the sender before passing the email along to AOL and Yahoo! along with more than half of the postage paid. The email service providers stand to collect millions of dollars per year from the initiative, which they say is reasonable compensation for the millions of dollars they have invested in spam-fighting technology.
AOL reportedly plans to set its system in motion within the next two months; Yahoo! plans to begin testing Goodmail soon.
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This is interesting stuff and i can see a lot of AOL users leaving their ISP in a short space of time once this starts to happen.
I wonder if they would allow Google to send messages to AOL users asking them to change over to Gmail?
Regards,
Lee
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Originally Posted by Lee
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