AOL e-mail tax

[Ed]

Opposition to AOL's 'email tax' grows

AOL annoys gun owners, greens, farm unions...almost everyone...
By John Oates
Published Wednesday 1st March 2006 12:49 GMT

More than 50 organisations are joining forces to protest against AOL's plan to start charging for email.

AOL is planning to charge mass-emailers a fee to avoid the ISP's spam filters and guarantee that their marketing emails arrive straight in AOL subscribers' inboxes.

But 54 groups - ranging from Gun Owners of America to Oxfam America and Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist - are asking AOL to rethink the decision.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is organising the protest through the website www.dearaol.com Nearly 1,500 individuals have already signed up in support.

More here - http://www.theregister.com/2006/03/01/protest_aol_email/

[Ed]

Ain't life grand?

[SharonBell]

Geez, I'd pay to keep them from spamming me! I'm sooo sick of the crap--stock tips, bigger breast, bigger penis, smaller waist, bigger butt, gold futures, and of course, the Nigerian-I-have-gold-bullion-just-give-me-your-bank-account-number scam!

[Ed]

I always got heaps and heaps of junkmail when I was on AOL, even though I never posted my e-mail addy on any forums - I think the spammers must send the crap out to randomly invented addresses, or something

Hotmail seems to have the best filter ATM - I haven't got any at all, ever, on my current addy

[doolols]

I've had a few bits on Hotmail. I get quite a lot on my main address at Yahoo, but ALL of it goes into the junk folder. There's never any that isn't spam-trapped. I still have to look through the folder, though, to get the odd one or two that I did want, and Yahoo have tried to take away.

When I first heard the AOL email thing, I thought they were going to launch a two-tier system, like the postal service here in the UK. 'Second Class' email would be free, but might take a day or so to arrive; 'First Class' would come immediately, but would cost a few fractions of a cent each. Surely, the idea of spam is that it costs nothing to send it to one person or several million? So if spammers are going to be charged, doesn't that defeat their object? 

[Ed]

The whole issue of junkmail is annoying, but you're right, Gerald - if the mailers had to pay to use it, there would be a significant drop in the amount of the stuff.  Trouble is, I can't see the AOL idea working against the spammers and I think the only people they'll inconvenience is their members.

I've noticed over the last year that @cafedoom.com addresses have been used by spammers to send junkmail, but there's nothing I can do to stop it - if they've got their own DNS name server, they can send mail under whatever address name they want to, apparently.  This has led to my cafedoom e-mail address being completely useless, because it's blocked by every spam filter now.  I used it to send a story to Eclectica a few weeks back, and never got a reply, so I assume it got eaten by spam filters

[doolols]

That's not very nice. It seems there's no way round problems like this.  :angry: