They want to tax e-mail, they say it's not really a tax

[genieroze]

This is real, not a urban legend

AOL accused of planning ‘two-tier’ internet
By Chris Nuttall in San Francisco
Published: February 28 2006 22:40 | Last updated: March 1 2006 01:35

AOLAOL, the internet service provider, has been accused of planning to introduce an “e-mail tax” that could lead to a two-tiered internet.

An unlikely coalition of civil liberties groups, charities, non-profit organisations, bloggers and gun owners have launched a website, DearAOL.com, to promote a letter-writing campaign against the service. They also threatened a boycott of AOL.

AOL said its CertifiedEmail programme was not a tax but an optional, voluntary way for large e-mail senders to pay to deliver authenticated, legitimate mail. It said it intended to launch the service within the next 30 days.

Goodmail, the provider of the new service, said last October that it was entering into a partnership with AOL and its rival Yahoo to offer a service that would send users e-mails they had opted to receive and protect them from spam and fraud.

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/7a358db2-a8a9-11da-aeeb-0000779e2340.html

[Singular73]

1. There is certainly a need for verified email....

This is just not the answer.

[Trillo]

2. If implemented, looking ahead,

they'll have to insure that the paid email maintains a service edge, so they'll likely start deliberatly delaying the non-paid email, perhaps to the point it would compete with snailmail. Just think of all the "tiers" of USPS mail service.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

3. If they need this as a reason to boycott AOLHell...

Then they just haven't been paying attention. :eyes:

[hfojvt]

4. it is not a tax

it does not come from a government and the revenues do not goto a government. It is a fee.
However, I find spam to be somewhat confusing. For one thing, I never got any except on hotmail and yahoo. Second, I am not sure how many of the senders ever make a profit from all of the spam that they send. If they were really legitimately selling a product, then why do they use the bogus subject lines?

[Freedom_Aflaim]

5. Fortunately, AOL isnt the Internet

Just a large service provider, that is getting smaller everyday.

I wish I could boycott AOL, but I dumped them a decade ago.

[Cronus Protagonist]

6. hahaah. That will make it easier to filter out the junk

Think about it. Who would pay to send you "opted-in" emails but the people who claim you opted-in when you did nothing of the sort. They're the senders that get filtered out by spam filters already. The emails that you really did opt-in to receive and you want to receive will already be in your approved senders list.

The paid email will ALL be spam. Your friends won't pay to send you email. Set a flag in your email client looking for that email to dump it, and you're good to go.

I like it. And besides, AOL is not the Internet and they can marginalize themselves all they want, as another poster in this thread noted. Let them make people use Yahoo and Google and MSN or others for their personal emails and they can just dump all the email coming through AOL.



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[wakeme2008]

7. It is not a tax but a cash cow for AOL

:grr:

[genieroze]

8. The point is not if we want to get rid of spam, of course we do, but

what's next? I'm in favor of getting rid of these spam bas tards, (sorry I have to type like this I got a parental filter on) but what is this leading to? What will it be next, any e-mail that is sent will be charged to your account by your ISP? It's the frog in the cool water thing, slowly turning up the heat until you are boiled to death. Most of theses SOBs use fake return addresses so you have to play detective to find out where it originated from. I use a mail washer that bounces back spam to the originating ISP if they use a real return address. Will I start getting charged for that? I don't use AOsmell, but they could be testing the waters for other ISPs to follow suit.