Security threats Toolkit

Stamping down on spam

Tags:
Yahoo!,
AOL,
Email,
Spam

Leader ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 06 Feb 2006 16:05 GMT

Charging for email? The very idea seems wrong. AOL and Yahoo's announcement that they were going to start to put a tariff on emails that would be guaranteed to arrive intact caused a lot of ominous rumblings. Will AOL and Yahoo users be showered with extra spam? Would 'non-guaranteed' emails end up in the technological equivalent of the canal behind the sorting office where lazy posties cut short their rounds?

We shouldn't worry that this is the beginning of a two-tier system, with personal emails lost in a limbo of cut-price, unreliable servers and half-maintained systems. Any hint that our email providers are offering any less of a service than before will trigger wholesale defections. The schemes are purely a way to cream off extra cash from marketing departments, the equivalent of direct mail operations who offer fake hand-written envelopes in an attempt to get past our well-evolved real life junk mail filters.

The cheapskates who continue to push out spam without paying the extra will continue to get caught and mangled by the spam filters already in place. The better funded campaigners will start to target their emails more carefully, as the old economics where one reply justified a million sent will no longer work — and they'll also be more likely to stick to the rules.

Optimists will say that this is the way the market adjusts to protect the users when legislation has failed. Perhaps. The combination of laws, filters and user education has certainly stemmed the problem — Jupiter Research expects an annual 13 percent fall in per-user spam received from now until the end of the decade — and as email becomes more reliable, it becomes a more attractive place to do business.

For once, a money-grubbing scheme is a good sign. Regulators who feel underemployed by the fading tide of spam may try wondering whether the simultaneous adoption of the plans by AOL and Yahoo is the first sign of an incipient cartel, but that's just normal paranoia. The idea of charging for advertising email gets our stamp of approval.