yahoo and aol are starting on a new controversial system that will give only 'paid' senders, the electronic equivalent of buying postage stamps, for guarantee of safe delivery of emails sent...or else your email will end up burried as spam in 'bulk' folder or even be undelivered.


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the idea seems to be control spam...but this is ridiculous because our normal personal mails may end up in bulk because we dont pay! so what will our inbox become the paid 'official' spam box while we will have to fish in for personal mails in the bulk box among other unpaid spams? absurd!

looks like yahoo and aol, internet's two highly preferred free email service providers as of today, are using the spam issue to their advantage to fill in their coffors out of their sheer - greediness.


hope this means the beginning end of the monopoly of these two, and not that of free email. hope gmail and other email providers dont follow suit, to cash in on the user's helplessness.

makes me wonder who is destroying email...the spammers or the email service providers?



shiv

Man! If I would ever think this is going to happen... No way! I mean, they can't charge for email now... That would be really stupid. It's one of the oldest if not THE oldest service on internet. They can't just that easy start charging for email. If this ever happens, I would be a first one to buy a server and start-up my own email server that would run for free.

AOL and Yahoo! aren't going to charge private users. They aren't going to give us bad service, either.

Read the entire article. They're thinking of offering companies the OPTION of guaranteed in-box delivery by paying a small fee per message sent. These "paid messages" merely bypass spam filters, that's all. (In return: any company who uses the "seal of approval" service risks account termination if they abuse the fact that their messages go directly to in-boxes.)

And when they say that they'll give paying customers preferential treatment, they only mean that these e-mails won't go through the spam-filtering process. All of the messages that you and I send and receive now go through the filters, so NOTHING is going to change as far as we're concerned.

I don't see Yahoo! or AOL suddenly changing how they deal with our unpaid messages. They wouldn't be stupid enough to intentionally dump our legit messages into spam or bulk folders just because we, the private users, don't pay for delivery services.

We GMailers don't have to worry about that. Actually, Google might start charging for some (extra) services, but it won't be necessary for other users, since it's security is almost perfect right now.

Besides GMail, there are hundreds of other mail services that are free and good at the same time. Why not switch there?

This will be a bad move for AOL and Yahoo!, since they will probably lose lots of their service's users.

As a computer nerd (and software developer) my solution is as follows...


1) buy a GumStix computer. + etherStix addon
2) hook it upto hom broadband
3) install SMTP and POP3 mail servers, along with spam assasin.
4) register for a free dynamic domain name.

There you have it, a home mail server, as secure as you can make it,the size of a stick of chewing gum, running of a couple of AA bateries. ( no need to worry about your power bill, like when you have an old 286 running as a mail server.

Don't say that to security specialists. They might get violent... There is no such thing a perfect security and not even "almost perfect". And I wouldn't regard Gmail as secure in anyways since Google's way of operating is quite questionable. It is quite obvious that they use Gmail for profiling. Some people might not consider that as a security issue, some people do.



I think this kind of solutions will be popping up more in future. Spam is a serious issue and keeps constantly growing. It is a problem to these big email providers, delivering, filtering and storing spam takes a huge chunk of resources which means more expenses. They'd like to find some solutions to it and why not do a little money with it?

The basic idea is quite good. You don't get much pointless mail in snailmail and the reason is that sending snailmail costs and is lot time consuming to do. You can't really make email sending more time consuming so that leaves making it cost something.

Well we all know that this kind of system just wouldn't work. Not all people are willing to pay for their email it's no surprise. Why start paying for something that's been free for years? Its now our fault that there is spam.

The solution has to come from somewhere else.

This is why I really like GMail's POP access. It allows me to filter the mail again when it gets to my mail program. In all, messages for me go through three SPAM filters, one when it arrives at my POBOX mail alias, one at gmail, and one at my mail program. I get essentially no SPAM and get reports on what was discarded so I can make sure I am getting what I need.

Honestly, though, if they (AOL and Yahoo) are good at their word of blocking folks who abuse the service, I would love a way to hang offenders by their nose hairs. Right now, I report messages to the various filters which missed it, but I can't really attack the SPAM at its source.

Paying for safe delivery of email, now I've heard it all. Email should remain free, we pay for internet access and POP and SMTP are just protocols that we are paying for. I liked the gumstix solution above . I'm sure this will be an optional service. Spam however just keeps getting worse and worse. If there's not, there should be a no spam list, such as the do not call list for telemarketers. It's insane, I dont' use my gmail for anything, and never listed it on a forum, but somehow I started getting spam. The same goes for university email. My hotmail and yahoo are boh flooded. The only one that's safe is my walla account.

Most of my filters take care of a lot of it, and Gmail does a great job of detecting spam. I know that was off topic but spam gets me going. Anyways thanks for the info, I'll look into it more.

So far as your email accounts are concerned it is the credibility of the service provider that matters the most. I have tried out few other free email service providers, but, their services are not consistent. You may find one fine moring that your important email account has been deleted and you can do nothing but to create a new email account. Luckily, the other free service providers which I have tried out, do not seem to be as much popular as Yahoo or AOL. So, I could use the same username even after it got deleted for some surprising reason ( obviously, not because of inactivity). But renowned providers like Yahoo will never do that but for your inactivity as per their stipulated rules.
Your email accounts are actually the key to your existence in the internet. So use of reputed email service providers appears to have definite reason. I, personally, have suffered a lot with few other free email service providers. Obviously, there are good providers ( other that Yahoos), but one must be extremely careful while selecting FREE service providers ( other than Yahoo or such big names).
Regards,
Sid