heyubob wrote:
Great, one more clever person has discovered a way to charge for
something they (isps like aol), could and should stop, on their own.
It seem that it would be impossible to tell who is generating all of
the spam, but someone has to cover the initial bottom-line (who paid
the bill?). If the N.S.A. can find out who's looking at porn, ya
think a few spammers could be found, and at least slowed down. You
should not have to pay (even more) for people and or companies to do
the right thing.
Did you actually *read* the article? They're not proposing that
individuals will pay for e-mail postage, just large commercial mailers.
Since obviously nobody could be bothered to follow the link (obvious
from the content of the replies) let me outline their plan.
They've made an arrangement with a third party company that will bond
the mailers (to ensure that they are *not* spammers) and to collect the
fees. The email is then marked so that it by-passes their spam filters
and is guaranteed to actually arrive in their subscriber's inbox.
Anything else has to run the usual gauntlet.
Will AOL *do this right*? I don't know, but they have every incentive to
do so. Not only are they a major ISP but also a major backbone and spam
costs them a pile of money. They have explicit policies that prevent
their members from originating spam so they're not a source of the
problem either.
At least they are attacking the source of the problem -- the economics
of spam.
--
Rod
