Could I pay for email, please? that'd be great

So, email is free.

It's always been free. Early on ( well, early on for what is now the Internet, a few groups floated the idea of making email something you had to pay for... but it never really went anywhere.

And consequently, email really took off. So did spamming, but most people do okay, striking some balance between the spammers and their friends forwarding them very important jokes and chain letters.

Now, there's another push for the idea of pay email. Our good friends at Yahoo and AOL are behind it this time, each of them substantial mail providers on the internet.

If they have their way, it will work like this: if you'd like to send email to any of the half-zillion people who's email addy either ends in @yahoo.com or @aol.com , you'd have two choices:

1. pay anywhere from a quarter-cent to $.01 per email message. this will guarantee delivery. Or...

2. not pay. Email sent from a source that doesn't "pay" ( more on this, below ) will be shot through the ever-increasing gauntlet of spam and content filters. Also... links, graphics and multi-media content will be stripped from these emails.

If you want to send pics, movies, or links to nana on Yahoo... no-pay is not an option.

Payments will be vetted through some 3rd coporation; Goodmail being the most likely candidate. The way it would likely work if AOL and Yahoo get there way is that if you want to send email to their customers, it would either have to come from Goodmail first, or have all that other stuff stripped out, and maybe not make it through at all.

Gosh, I wonder if Yahoo or AOL own any part of Goodmail. Hmmmmm.

You'd have to get a Goodmail account, and pay them, if you wanted to send email to grandma, if she had a Yahoo email address.


On the plus side... If you happen to have Yahoo or AOL email, odds are your spam emails will drop to zero.

On the down side, most other emails would also drop to zero, probably. How many of your friends like you enough to get a Goodmail account and pay to send you email? Do you think it more likely that they'll just keep sending email the regular way, and if you want to "get" their email, you'll have to jump to some easier email system?

I dislike spam, of course. But to me, this sounds like someone not really looking to solve a problem, but more like their looking to make a buck. Or a quarter-cent, times a zillion.

I'm not sure how this will go... they are hold Congressional hearings on this right now, and as the oil companies have no firm stake in this eaither way, it's hard to say which way things will go. Greedy bastards and fed up spam-ees will calmour for the service, and 98f the population will come out against it.


I can tell you this, though. If it's adopted, I believe people will simply go to sources that don't require such tomfoolery, pressure their friends and relatives to do likewise, and do what they can to edge around such tollbooths. I see people taking more time and effort to cirvumvent paying then just paying and dealing with the indignity of having something that was free now pay.

Commoditization is a term describing a service or product that is so widespread and offered at so many points so that it doesn't make sense to charge for it. Water is like that, in America... water fountains are everywhere, and none of them charge a cent. Or a quarter-cent. Bottled water companies come along and redo the biz model a little, and now can charge for water... but you can still get it for free.

What AOL and Yahoo are doing is essentiall the same thing; they are offering their water, but now charging you for it. Their not making their water better... but rather everyone else's water worse.

Yum.