The Electronic Postage Stamp
According to the Sydney Morning Herald:
Companies will soon have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp if they want to be certain their emails are delivered.
America Online and Yahoo!, two of the largest email account providers, are about to start using a system that gives preference to messages from companies that pay up to US1¢ each to have them delivered. The senders must promise to contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages or risk being blocked.
The internet companies say this will help them identify legitimate mail and reduce junk email, identity-theft scams and other scourges that plague users. They also will earn millions of dollars a year if the system is widely adopted.
Full story here: AOL & Yahoo! announce pay-per-email strategy.
So does this mean the end of free email as we know it?
I doubt it. This looks more like a way for real advertisiers to ensure their message is received by the larger free email account providers, and for those large free account providers to establish a profitable new revenue stream. The small players, phishers, and mass-mailing companies (legitimate or otherwise) who choose not to engage in this pay-per-email scheme will still have to run the gauntlet of spam checkers.
Furthermore, additional DNS configuration (adding an SPF record) would ensure that emails can only be sent from the domain that they claim to be sent from. This is a simple configuration change that many ISPs don’t enforce but one that allows widespread abuse of email. The lack of an SPF record means that spammers can easily send out email that looks like it came from your domain, which can then make your domain look bad (if the recipient thinks you really sent it), and can cost you time and money (when people complain to you, rather than the spammer). 1st October 2004 was the target date for domains to have SPF records in place (Hotmail, for example, started checking SPF records on 1st Oct 2004).
SPF records by themselves don’t stop spam, but they help to better ensure the legitimacy of emails you do receive and pass one more test in the spam filter instead of disappearing down a black hole.
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