Originally published February 23 2006
AOL and Yahoo to charge businesses to send email
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
The two companies are planning a certified email service for companies to ensure that emails are not blocked, delivered late, sent to users’ spam and more. It will cost between one-quarter of a cent to a penny for each commercial message.
The two companies partnered last October with Goodmail Systems, a Mountain View, California-based company that offers a CertifiedEmail service that is intended to shield email users from spam, fraud, and phishing attacks.
However, The New York Times reported Sunday that the service will also enable Dulles, Virginia-based AOL and Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo to recoup the costs of providing email to users by charging even legitimate businesses to send them email.
Companies will have to pay between one-quarter of a cent to a penny for each commercial message they want to send to AOL and Yahoo Mail users.
Goodmail said its service helps protect users from fraudulent messages where the sender disguises his or her true email address, and helps guard against identity theft.
"We believe this new layer of protection will widen the gap between the amount of good email we want our users to get and the dwindling amount of bad emails they might get," said Barry Appelman, chief web strategist at AOL, last October.
He sees a certain logic in its resemblance to the regular postal system, where the sender, not the recipient, pays, and senders pay more for certified delivery than for regular first-class mail.
Some Internet service providers such as AT&T, BellSouth, and Verizon Communications have recently been calling for services that require heavy amounts of bandwidth to pay them to use their pipes (see Telcos Propose Web Tiers).
The Senate Commerce Committee plans to begin hearings Tuesday on legislation calling for so-called "Net neutrality" that would prevent Internet service providers from prioritizing their traffic in this way.
The sender pays Goodmail the fees to use its CertifiedEmail service and a portion of the fees are remitted back to the partner Internet service providers, so they can use a portion of the money to pay for the expense of keeping its users' email inboxes clean.
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