St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Starting next month, AOL and Yahoo will accept payment from spammers to guarantee delivery of their mass e-mails to individuals. AOL has long done this with their “White List”, but as far as I have been able to tell, Yahoo has never done list, instead relying on a user created black-list to block spam.
The large public outcry over this latest “Pay to Spam Our Users” program has only prompted AOL to allow non-profits to spam AOLer’s for free. Instead of blocking more spam, it is allowing more spam.

There are three main reasons for opposition:

• Users want less Spam
• E-mail Marketers don’t want to have to pay a tax for each e-mail sent
• People using e-mail for legitimate purposes (like your bank), don’t want to have to pay a tax per e-mail to make sure their e-mail gets through.

Personally I also feel that, knowing AOL, which is famous for just “dropping” millions of e-mails indiscriminately daily when their servers get full, won’t be able to deliver on their promise of guaranteed delivery, and I’m almost sure the implementation will make AOLer’s e-mail service even worse than it is already.

AOL spamming its users is nothing new. Ever since they began they’ve been selling their users e-mail addresses and other personal info to mass marketing companies. Whoops, they call it “sharing personal information with our partners” like the people who make Viagra are partners of AOL, right… But Yahoo has a long standing reputation of protecting its users and having one of the first and best spam blocking programs out there.

Sources:
Wired News
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