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AOL to Charge Senders for Some Emails?
Posted February 2, 2006 – 5:40 pm by Yakov Shafranovich in Spam and EmailA recent post on Circle-ID by Matt Blumberg states that AOL is planning to charge some commercial senders for specific types of emails. A related story makes things a bit more clearer:
In a bid to protect its members from e-mail fraud and phishing, and to offer consistency to commercial e-mail senders, AOL today will begin implementing Goodmail’s cryptographic CertifiedEmail program and phasing out its IP-based Enhanced Whitelist.
As part of its e-mail security practices, AOL blocks the display of images and hyperlinks on most high-volume messages, except if senders are on the AOL Enhanced whitelist and maintain very low complaint rates. Beginning today, AOL will also allow senders who have undergone accreditation through Goodmail to display images and hyperlinks by default. Goodmail charges accredited companies a fraction of a cent per message sent.
In addition, AOL will add a “trust symbol” to messages sent by Goodmail’s CertifiedEmail senders. It will appear in the inbox and the message window, so members will understand that a sender’s identity and reputation have been verified.
There are three important points here:
1. This fee is only charged for specific types of emails (”enhanced whitelist”) - with links and images. All other emails can be sent plain text.
2. A trust symbol will be used by AOL.
3. A cryptographic token is used for signing email similar to DKIM.
Leaving aside the business aspects, what is interesting about this, is that AOL is basically providing for the community a test-case of how three different things would work: e-postage, trust symbols (like browser padlocks) and cryptographic tokens. All of this of course will be very interesting to watch, especially the spammers’ reactions to this.
UPDATE: Suresh states in the comments at Circle-ID that the entire story might be wrong and AOL is not shutting down its enhanced whitelist. ALSO, it seems that the person who wrote the Circle-ID article is in fact a CEO of a competitor to GoodMail.
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