AOL/Yahoo E-mail Certification Fees Don't Make Cents

In an age where spam is as prevalent as high-speed Internet access - or somewhere close to such - many Internet services providers (ISP's) are trying everything they can think of to fight back and keep web surfers' e-mail inboxes from becoming so overloaded that they cannot get to their news alerts, online correspondence with friends and family, messages to and from coworkers, and so forth. But just these past few weeks, a crazy idea to solve the spam problem, introduced at America Online and Yahoo, appears to have taken the idea of unsolicited e-mail sorting a little too far. And it just happens to be one of the worst ideas ever conceived to keep the information highway running smoothly. Maybe even the definite worst ever. And the idea might well fail just for that.

Why is this so? Basically, AOL and Yahoo, like Microsoft's MSN beforehand, made the decision to introduce an e-mail sorting option based on certification. But unlike MSN's certification solution, which the Vole refers to as Sender ID, AOL and Yahoo charge a fee for certification of e-mail - effectively creating a prepaid postage requirement for bulk e-mail that spammers theoretically could not pay for without shooting themselves in the proverbial foot. The idea is great in theory, but I shall expect it to be bad in practice. And that's because spammers have done everything they can to get around the best of spam defenses - and will likely continue to do so for quite some time.

Oh sure, you say, non-profits are exempt from the postage payment requirement (AOL actually recently said so) - but paying for e-mail trust might have too many issues to remain economically viable, and not even as a solution to spam. After all, MSN failed with Sender ID - legitimate business did not like the Vole's proprietary culture enough to jump on board (and never have), but spammers went crazy to sign up for MSN's certification. So what's to stop them from paying AOL and Yahoo for their e-mail certification program? After all, bulk mailers prepay their postage for the offline postal system that geeks call 'snail-mail' - so the same could very well happen to the virtual postal system known as e-mail.

Not only that, but these are American companies - which means some business in the United States could very well sue the pants off Time Warner (the company that owns AOL) - or just as easily file a class-action legal brief on Yahoo - over first-amendment protections of free speech and unrestricted expression among individuals, companies, the press, et al that the Bill of Rights addendum's to the U.S. Constitution are supposed to entail. This could create a bureaucratic nightmare for the companies at hand - nobody likes to go to court, and nobody wants to pay their way out of a bad decision of any sort - business-related or otherwise.

Bottom line: charging a postage rate for bulk e-mail is just plain wrong for a service that millions of people use for free - or next to nothing - on a daily basis. The economics are just not in AOL or Yahoo's favor to support this idea, nor are all the things that could backfire on them. By charging a prepaid-postage fee for bulk e-mail, both of these companies are setting a very dangerous precedent.

And that's just plain wrong.