You've Got PayMail

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The campaign started on February 28 with an open letter to AOL, co-signed by such diverse organizations as MoveOn.org Civic Action, Gun Owners of America, and Craigslist. The letter claims that AOL's plan to use Goodmail is "the first step down a slippery slope that will harm the Internet itself" by creating a two-tiered mail system, one for paying senders and one for non-paying senders -- with a built-in incentive for AOL to shift senders from the latter class into the former.

"What worries us is that AOL is using the spam problem as a stick to encourage us to pay up," says Danny O'Brien of the Internet watchdog organization Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It turns the Inbox into a cash box for AOL, instead of something to be protected."

Goodmail and AOL have not said what they will charge companies for sending certified mail, other than to state that the fee will be based on the number of delivered messages. That's what has nonprofits worried. Some, like MoveOn.org, send opt-in mail to millions of members, with as many as 25 percent being AOL users. The charges to certify delivery on that scale could be prohibitive for such cash-strapped organizations.

Telecommunications expert and Carnegie-Mellon professor David Farber, who runs the not-for-profit mailing list Interesting People, which covers issues of Internet governance and politics, is skeptical. "The difference between a spammer and a mass mailer gets very hazy, and I don't think AOL is in the business of making that judgment," he says. "I think you'll wind up with a very pro forma response, which will be, 'You pay us, and we'll say you're not a spammer until someone proves you are.' It won't cut down on the amount of spam I get -- and it may increase it in the long run."

Richi Jennings, an analyst at Ferris Research, a messaging market research company, says AOL's economic self-interest dictates that it will continue to aggressively block spammers, whether or not they're using certification. "AOL's major revenue stream relies on subscribers," says Jennings. "If an organization's mail is generating a significant number of spam complaints, AOL will cease delivering mail from that organization -- it's that simple. Goodmail is nothing to do with reducing spam -- it's to do with outsourcing some of AOL's Whitelist for senders who see value in paying."

In other words, Goodmail is about as much of a threat to ordinary e-mail delivery as the U.S. Postal Service's Certified Mail service is to the delivery of ordinary first-class mail. And it does about as much to combat junk e-mail -- which is to say, nothing.