Yesterday the NYT picked up the story that AOL and Yahoo are prepared to drop their spam filters for cash – between a quarter of a cent and one cent per e-mail – and the blogosphere is now fairly buzzing over the news (it’s the #1 story on Megite and tech.memeo already), though no one’s talking about tha angle that’s bugging me.
The concept of charging senders is old news, but this implementation is new (at least to me). According to the Times:
AOL and Yahoo will still accept e-mail from senders who have not paid, but the paid messages will be given special treatment. On AOL, for example, they will go straight to users’ main mailboxes, and will not have to pass the gantlet [gasp – a typo in the Times?] of spam filters that could divert them to a junk-mail folder or strip them of images and Web links. As is the case now, mail arriving from addresses that users have added to their AOL address books will not be treated as spam.
(A Q for anyone who knows these services – I assume that payment does not bypass a manual blacklist? Now that would be controversial.)
Cory says the system “will undermine the ability of activist groups like MoveOn and others to correspond with their supporters”. I doubt that very much – the treatment of existing email will not be changed. And Nicholas Carr follows up on the net neutrality theme raised in the NYT article – maybe, but that’s for another day. And Microsoft News Tracker says of the underlying service, provided by Goodmail, “Non-certified email may be sent to the trash, user’s junk folder or inbox – delivery to the inbox is NOT guaranteed.” Trash???
No, what I’m wondering is whether the concept allows AOL and Yahoo to profit from their own inefficient spam filtering, and whether it creates a perverse incentive for future development of the filters. This is a little like Microsoft charging a fee for spyware monitoring.
Consider that only “legitimate” commercial e-mailers will participate – the service won’t have any effect on the true spammers, who will continue to pump out their billions of messages. And since unwanted legitimate commercial e-mail is easy to block, either through CAN-SPAM or ordinary spam blocking tools, we are talking here about email that the recipient welcomes or is indifferent to blocking. The idea here is to make it easier for commercial emailers to navigate the treacherous waters of unpredictable spam filters, which make receipt uncertain and often alter messages before they are delivered. So in effect, AOL and Yahoo are using the inefficiency of their own spam filters – spam filters for which they undoubtedly charge the customer or that were certainly marketed to existing or prospective customers as a value-add – to drive a system for charging senders to ensure a clean delivery.
AOL and Yahoo will naturally say that their hands are tied – spam filtering is tough work and their filters are good as they can make them, and that spam costs them a fortune, and they need to recover some of that. Any maybe there is truth to this. So why not charge the customer extra? Because email is a commodity business and there are many providers – no one wants to take that step – what better way to lose your base. Much better to charge the sender – like a tax, or an insurance premium, if it’s spread wide, it’s spread thin.
Last point – if this is an issue because spam filtering is in fact rocket science, once AOL and Yahoo get hooked on the drip of a steady cash infusion from this service, what incentive will there be for them to improve their filters’ ability to discriminate between wanted and unwanted email?
Update: Mark Federman sets me straight on the spelling of “gantlet” (and has some other great comments today to boot – thanks, Mark).
Update (2006-02-06): Both Techdirt and Michael Geist pick up on the notion that this system rewards AOL and Yahoo! for inefficient spam filtering. Techdirt: “AOL and Yahoo are basically going to try to charge marketers for the fact that their own spam filters don’t work all that well and are blocking legitimate messages.” Michael Geist:
Second, should the revenues become significant, the program may ultimately create an incentive to limit the reliability of anti-spam filtering. If this does generate millions of dollars (as the Times suggests), then AOL may find that it is profitable to have spam filters that block lots of legitimate content since that will encourage more senders to pay the certified email fees. Indeed, the program flips the traditional incentives since the less reliable the traditional email systems, the more valuable the certified email programs.