[extropy-chat] Email Postage

[Robert Bradbury]

Ok, this news item clarifies things:

http://www.physorg.com/news10601.html

The plan is for Yahoo & AOL to charge *senders* between $.0025 and $.01 per
message for guaranteed delivery.  This is a *sender pays* model (just like
normal mail).  What you are paying for is:
a) Bypassing of spam filters that might reject your messages.
b) Sender Guarantees.  I.e. that Yahoo/AOL make sure that if it goes
directly into your inbox (bypassing the SPAM filters) that it is from a
"real sender".  I.e. The Red Cross requesting donations really is the Red
Cross and not someone pretending to be them.

They also say (at least for now) that all other mail remains "free" (after
all at least with AOL you are *paying* for the mailbox).  However incoming
mail may be subjected to the delays and false positives that are involved in
spam filtering.  If they want to be a really "low-life" provider they would
presumably cut back on hardware/software investments to do the spam
filtering so it might end up taking an increasingly long time for
non-prepaid messages to get into your mailbox.  However it seems unlikely
that this may happen as one would expect providers to have management
policies that anticipate very large volume mail days (for days that things
like natural disasters occur) and have reserve capacity to deal with this.

Robert
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