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Well it's nice to see the mainstream media finally waking up to the fact that NZ has been lumbered with slow, limited, expensive broadband for some time now but Aardvark has been playing this tune for years already -- so I'm not going to say any more today.

What I am going to talk about is the plan by Yahoo and AOL to charge for the direct delivery of email to their clients' mailboxes.

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They allege that by imposing a tiny charge per delivery for placing your message straight into a user's mailbox, you avoid the risk of having your important communications mistakenly labeled as spam and dropped into the spam folder.

Now I'm sure we've all missed the occasional "real" email when this has happened by overly agressive spam filtering so providing a method of avoiding such errors is a great idea right?

Wrong!

Am I the only one who can see that there are a *lot* of direct marketers out there who will see this as a great way of ensuring that their MLM or other sales-pitch will reach their victim's mailbox rather than a spam folder?

Of course we've always been led to believe that the reason spam is so common and therefore annoying is due to the fact that you can send millions of messages for a few dollars. Surely therefore, charging a cent (or fraction thereof) for each delivery, as proposed by Yahoo & AOL, would make it uneconomic for spammers to use this route.

Wrong!

It costs the average junk mailer (as opposed to emailer) a whole lot more than a cent (or fraction thereof) to fill your mailbox with their brochures, special offers and other bits of worthless ink-soaked wood-pulp, so even at the rates Yahoo & AOL are proposing, this is still cheap marketing.

It strikes me that if email providers start offering this kind of "skip the spam filters for a price" service then users of those services will soon become inundated with a new kind of paid spam.

Of course it's easy to see why the mail providers are keen on introducing such a service -- it means that instead of being a cost and a burden, spam will actually become a revenue/profit generator for them.

What would be the next step I wonder?

Maybe they'll also introduce an option which would allow users to block this paid-spam -- for a fee of course.

So on the one hand we'll have spammers paying to have their garbage delivered to mailboxes and mailbox users paying to have it dumped. Sounds like a win-win for Yahoo & AOL to me.

Let's hope that users vote with their feet on this one.

What do you think?

Would you be happy to receive a "better class of spam" where the sender has to pay for delivery - or would you simply change webmail providers if this type of thing was introduced?

Tell us all and see what others have to say in The Aardvark Forums

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