please empty your brain below
It's nothing to do with spam, and everything to do with a new revenue stream.
I think this is really good for pissing off spammers: Spam Poison
If everyone boycotted AOL and Yahoo, then they'd have to rethink. Thing is, most people won't be bothered.
You do, I do, but I don't think that's true of the majority of people. Teenagers I know regularly spend £20-£30 a week on text messaging.
Meanwhile, everyone else says "Get a proper ISP"
I check the inbox about once a month and do not have yahoo as my ISP.
Therefore I reckon (net of advert income) I'm probably costing them a little to host all that spam, rather than them making money from me.
There's a particular Usenet newsgroup favoured by system administrators for letting off steam. A recruiter once went through, harvested email addresses, and spammed them with job opportunities in Florida - regardless of where the people might live. (I'd have thought the .fi and .za people were particularly amused) The company's internet presence promptly vanished for a few weeks, and its reappearance came with a very long, contrite apology letter. Definitely one of the War on Spam's better moments.
I think the "pay a tiny charge for every e-mail" idea's been bubbling around for years. Even though one cent's only about half a penny, it still seems far more than the sums advocated at the time. Perhaps if George Bush and his Florida-governin' brother got their arses into gear... oh no, that'd disrupt legitimate business, wouldn't it?
Anyway. Email will always be free, it may become advert laden (more so) but I think it's too far gone now to receive a radical overhaul. Give it a few months and AOL will stop their silly games (and start some other ones). I hope.
AOL is the nanny of the net and I hate them/it with a passion. It's for people who need to be told what to do. (For a technophobe and computer illiterate like ME to be saying that, they must be really bad.)
Who are these two companies to decide who is a legitimate company and who isn't? It stinks. Having said that, my spam filter is now collecting an average of 180 e-mails per day and I'm sick of skimming through them, which has to be done to fish out the legitimate ones which have been wrongly trapped. I really wish there was a way of stopping them.
Mostly, people can't be bothered to change suppliers for services, even if they know they are causing them problems (eg AOL users not getting receipts for purchases etc).
Look how many people still pay over the odds by buying their energy from the original supplier in their area, or use BT for their phone service, or have mortgages on the variable rate rather than a deal, or have a bank account that pays no, or 0.1\\% interest on credit balances, or never shop around for insurance at renewal time.
No, a significant proportion of profit in the business world is made by human apathy.
It was more a case of fielding emails from AOL customers about why they didn't get receipts, or updates, or whatever. And then fielding further emails from them about why we never replied. Of course, I tried emailing AOL about this, but that bounced too.
Given that most spam seems to come from entirely fictitious email addresses, I fail to see how this procedure could be effective anyway.
I don't think that Yahoo are much better either. They seem to be a company looking in vain for a purpose.
Back to the original point, where does the money go? I bet it's not to the recipient of the email, is it.
In any case, I only use Yahoo! when I need a junk address for something. And I use Gmail when I want to be sure that the Chinese government will be able to read whatever I'm sending in their direction..."do no evil" my eye...
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