Pay-to-spam?

Spam is the big scourge of the internet. Spammers are increasingly from organised crime rather than the small-time scam artists of a few years back. And they're allegedly raking in large sums of money from people stupid enough to fall for their scams. Are AOL and Yahoo looking to get a piece of the action with their new Pay-to-spam scheme?

AOL and Yahoo plan to charge fees of up to one cent (US) per message to those that sign up for the service.

Paying the fees means that messages will not go through spam filters, are guaranteed to arrive and will bear a stamp of authenticity.

Both AOL and Yahoo said they would start offering the service within the next few months.

I can't help feeling this is not going to be a good thing. This will mean most end-users receiving *more* spam, not less. Only this time from big business rather than Florida-based crooks.

It could easily make life a lot harder for small mailing discussion lists (i.e. anything other than Yahoo's own yahoogroups). I can see them making their spam filters more and more aggressive, and respond with 'pay up'.

It could well accelerate the decline of mailing lists in favour of the inexplicably fashionable slow clunky web-boards with their all their graphical cruft and stupid avatars.

This is a bad idea, that deserves to be strangled at birth.

Update: A Yahoo PR flack in the comments claims that my fears are groundless. But the Electronic Frontier Foundation seem to echo what I've been saying.

Email readers and senders will both lose, because the incentives for Yahoo, AOL, and Goodmail are all wrong. Their service is only valuable if it "saves" you from their spam filters. In turn, they have an incentive to treat more of your email as spam, and thereby "encouraging" people to sign up.

Even email senders who just want to reach [email protected] may eventually be in trouble. Once a pay-to-speak system like this gets going, it will be increasing difficult for people who don't pay to get their mail through. The system has no way to distinguish between ordinary mail and bulk mail, spam and non-spam, personal and commercial mail. It just gives preference to people who pay.

And prepare to be shaken down if you run a noncommercial mailing list, whether for local bowling leagues or political organizations with a national membership. Not only will the per-message fees quickly add up, but the Goodmail technology will be costly for senders to setup and use. Goodmail's giving a "special offer" for nonprofits through 2006, but, when that ends, their messages will presumably end up in the trash, too.