"The Internet has become what it is because of freedom of communication. Open discussion is what gives it value. There should be no cost for particular services, and e-mail should be free and accessible to all," said Cox.
America Online and Yahoo are about to give special treatment to messages from companies that pay up to one cent each to guarantee delivery. On AOL they will not have to pass filters that could divert them to a spam e-mail folder.
The Goodmail CertifiedEmail service identifies email from accredited senders, marks messages with a trust symbol indicating they are safe to open and assures delivery directly to the inboxes of intended recipients.
The company charges an accreditation fee ($200) and a per-message fee, split with the e-mail providers. Goodmail is providing reduced tokens to early adopters in the first year.
Unpaid messages will be subject to AOL's spam-filtering process. Most unpaid messages will also not be displayed with their original images and links.
The system will apply not only to mass mailings but also to individual messages.
Cox said that charging for e-mail services was unlikely to reduce spam despite what he thinks AOL and Yahoo will claim.
"It won't reduce spam directly. AOL is already good at managing spam issues, and Yahoo is getting better," said Cox.
Also, users might not be so keen on the idea of unsolicited marketing messages getting delivered simply because the marketers have paid to stay out of the junk mail box.
This old bromide as a solution to spam has been around and rejected for the past 15 years, at least. It's not only an old idea; it's one that has been well hashed over by everyone in the industry. Apparently some newbies at AOL and Yahoo! didn't get the memo.
Yahoo!'s and AOL's plans won't actually do anything to stop illegal spammers. What they will do is raise the participation bar for legitimate marketers, newsletter writers and a host of other commercial interests that may have legitimate reasons for getting in touch with you.
Similar thing has been tried a few years ago in Korea. The biggest free e-mail provider "Hanmail" adopted same technology and policy for their inboxes.
What have resulted is that it didn't stop spam but blocked tons of legit e-mails. A bulk of Korean companies just stopped sending e-mails to Hanmail inboxes and asked their customers to provide other e-mail addresses.
The concept of certifying legitimate marketers is not new, said John Mozena, spokesperson for the antispam group Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail (CAUCE).
There are several third-party organizations, such as TRUSTe, that ask marketers to jump through a few extra hoops to be given a seal of approval that will get them past spam filters, Mozena said.
But whether it is a good idea to involve money in that transaction is another matter, he said, because it creates several gray areas. "It seems almost a bit like extortion," he said. "Pay up and your e-mail doesn't get hurt."
Goodmail does not reduce spam it simply offers a new revenue model for ISP's.
Domain Keys, Sender ID, and SPF (Sender Policy Framework) are some of the solutions offered for the SPAM problem.
But what problem is AOL and Goodmail trying to solve?
They're trying to solve the problem of revenue and costs --either to reduce the actual costs of policing spam or to make incremental revenue on their user base by charging to send.
Traditional whitelist providers charge a small fixed fee to those mailers who can qualify to get onto their whitelist and do not charge a fee per message like Goodmail does. The cost differential between Goodmail's approach and the traditional whitelist providers is significant to the mailer. Of course, AOL makes no money with traditional whitelist providers and can make a significant amount of money with Goodmail.
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