Postage Due — for your corporate e-mail

Published on February 6th, 2006

Companies will soon have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp if they want to be certain that their e-mail will be delivered to many of their customers.

America Online and Yahoo, two of the world’s largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a controversial 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. The senders must contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages, or risk being blocked entirely.

Detailed article — including a fair description of pros and cons. Y’all had better check it out because Congress will probably get involved. It doesn’t matter what side they start out on — they’re still liable to screw it up.

11 users responded in " Postage Due — for your corporate e-mail "

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# 1 Smith said, on February 6th, 2006 at 7:39 am

I have two concerns: 1) How secure will the system be from spoofing the billing address to some poor schmuck, and 2) how long will it be before everyone gets charged for e-mail?

Another nail-in-the-coffin for the Internet.

# 2 KB said, on February 6th, 2006 at 8:33 am

The only sentence one really needs to read from the article is the following: “Goodmail was founded several years ago with the idea that it would charge postage for all mail, but….”

Any questions as to the agenda here?

# 3 Brady J. Frey said, on February 6th, 2006 at 9:07 am

Horrible idea, especially for AOL, who’s little logo twist and security pitch have been an answer to their losing customer base. So good for them for making a buck in the short term, but losing clients in the long run.

Do we see this as the rise of instant messenger, blogs, and project management web sites (hopefully serving xml for export) as a preferred, documented means of communication now? It’s free, less spam filled (well, the blog may not be), and much more interactive?

# 4 C. Flowers said, on February 6th, 2006 at 9:18 am

I guess this will just provide other free email providers with more business! Ridiculous idea…what were they thinking?

# 5 Rick Pali said, on February 6th, 2006 at 9:48 am

If Hotmail and Gmail are smart and stay away from this horrible idea, they stand to gain a lot of users when AOL and Yahoo users realise some of their legitimate mail is being dropped in an attempt to blackmail e-mail senders. Or at least that’s what *should* happen.

Will users have the ability to whitelist addresses of their choosing? If not, users will be driven away in droves. Even with that ability they’ll still not get some legitimate mail…and that kind of defeats the whole purpose.

# 6 garym said, on February 6th, 2006 at 9:50 am

I proposed something similar to this in a paper while working on my undergraduate degree. But, instead of having companies pay for every email they send, have them pay a fixed amount for every million. The idea isn’t to discourage email use, but to put a cost on the mass-mailers to slow down the amount of SPAM flooding the Internet.
Curiously, I got the idea after reading one of John Dvorak’s columns about how email is killing the Internet and businesses are less likely to use email as a form of corporate communication.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1599324,00.asp, The Death of E-mail.

As part of the paper, I did a small survey (40 college students, 20 coworkers, 40 local businesses who use email) and found that as SPAM filters got better, businesses looked more favorably to using email than individual users. (I surmised that it was because corporate IT departments are better or more diligent at writing rules that identify SPAM than individual users.)
I still think this would work, but I would definitely put a lower limit on the amount of email sent through one of these portals. I wouldn’t charge 1/4 cent for every email, maybe $100 for every million per day. That way you are really targeting the spammers.
But it leaves open the question of who collects it, the originating ISP, the receiving ISP or the interconnect provider and how they share the revenue.

# 7 Greg Mc said, on February 6th, 2006 at 4:21 pm

Personally, I would invert the model. First set a threshold on what constitutes a heavy mail sender. Charge any heavy mailer a fixed amount at the start of the month/year/whatever period, and put it into a trust account. During the coming days, the email recipients (ISP subscribers) have the option to send spam mail to a central mailbox. Undeliverable garbage addresses go into the same can. For every piece of their mail that hits the “spam can”, the mailer loses a portion of their trust fund. Once the trust is exhausted, the mailer is blocked until they provide more funds for the trust. Proceeds are kept by the ISP and are used to reduce their operating costs.

In this way, only the companies that send out unwanted bulk emails get penalized, and the mailers have a motivation to clean up their acts and their lists.

# 8 Pat said, on February 6th, 2006 at 9:16 pm

garym

Won’t work. Sorry buddy. The spammers that send out millions of spam emails don’t use their own computers. That makes them too easy to filter and block. They use a lot of robot computers that have been hijacked just to send email. Each header would have the hijacked address, not the true sender’s.

Then there are the legitimate bulk emailers. I get email from several newspapers, including the Washington Post, New York Times, PC Magazine and PC world. If they had to pay to send these emails I’m sure they would quit.

The only advantage to collecting money per email would be to enrich someone’s pocket that is already pretty full. True spammers would find a way around it.

# 9 garym said, on February 7th, 2006 at 7:19 am

Pat,

I agree it won’t work. Like I said, it was for a college paper. I know that I for one would not pay extra to send email. I already pay for my connection and ISP, I don’t think that I should pay someone another fee for insuring that my email gets delivered.

But, then again…if my ISP sent me a bill for say $1000 because my computer sent out 10 million emails last month because it was hijacked and used as a SPAMbot, you know I would certainly take action to 1) clean my computer, 2) learn about computer security, and 3) hunt down the bastards who did this and get my money from them.

It may actually eliminate SPAM by killing off the spammers.

# 10 AB CD said, on February 7th, 2006 at 9:45 pm

Sound like a great idea if they give part of the money to the recipients. Better yet, they can let recipients place a price on what spam mail they would receive, and spammers can send accordingly.

# 11 Lewis Perdue said, on February 9th, 2006 at 11:28 am

AB CD has the best idea … let the spammers pay the recipients. Or have the email service split a fee … part to the recipient and part to email system which will provide the filtering to make it possible.

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