Email Fee to Fight Spam

In a surprise move AOL and Yahoo are adopting a new strategy to fight spammers where it hurts most, the wallet. The strategy aims to stop spammers by charging for bulk emails to AOL and Yahoo accounts. Bulk Email senders will be required to signup and pay a fee to get their email to an AOL or Yahoo customer. The fee will range from one cent to less than a cent per email. The bulk email sender will in return be able to send a certified email that gets to the recipient. In this case it gets directly to the recipient. The email will bypass the Spam filters, image filters, and other Spam blocking techniques. This will enable bulk email senders to be able to send a graphic rich email to recipients and they will see the images in the email. Typically these images are turned off by AOL and Yahoo before they arrive in the recipients inbox.

The Future of Bulk Email?

The idea behind this program is that a legitimate bulk email sender will find it worthwhile to pay a small fee to ensure a delivered email. The flip side is the spammer will not want to pay the fee. If this technique works this could well spell an end to the current way spammers send bulk email.

The program, "CertifiedEmail", is being developed in conjunction with Goodmail Systems. If it proves successful with these two large email providers, expect to see it adopted by other companies.

For individuals sending email to their friends this program shouldn't impact them. The program is only intended for bulk email, which is a message to multiple recipients (usually thousands) from one source or multiple messages from one source. The program doesn't detail what it considers the threshold of cc'ing a few friends and bulk email. It's unlikely that cc'ing 10 friends will be an issue though.

The Yahoo program has not been started yet, but the AOL program is gearing up for a full launch. AOL will be phasing out it's previous programs called "Whitelist" and "Enhanced Whitelist."

Bulk Senders CertifiedEmail Check List

For bulk email senders there are some things to consider when planning your next email campaign:

1. Should I email my whole list?
   - Unless your list is very clean and targeted, you now have more reason than ever to clean it up and segment it.
2. Should I keep using my email delivery tracking?
   - Email delivery tracking and reporting gives marketers valuable information about their email. They find out if the email was delivered, if it was open, if a link was clicked, etc. With the CertifiedEmail program the fee a sender pays almost guarantees the message to get through. You may no longer need to track it to see if it got through the filters, but it's still valuable to know if it was opened and what, if any, kind of action was taken.
3. If I don't use this program will my bulk emails go through?
   - It's very unlikely that anything above a very small minority of your messages will go through, even with unique techniques to beat the system. If you want a message to get through with some degree of certainty, you'll have to signup and pay your penny or less per email.

* Source: Goodmail Systems CertifiedEmail