Guarantee to Spam!!

Sometime back, Bill Gates proposed that people should be charged a minimal amount to send emails which would effectively put a check on spam since spammers won’t be able to foot the heavy bills that will arise due to the millions of spam emails that they send. The system would otherwise hardly raise a significant problem to legitimate senders as the cost per email can be a few cents. That proposal was met with same defiance as open source & Linux/Unix junkies show at the mention of “Microsoft”!!

But now it seems that Yahoo! and AOL have decided to take on that proposal but only to modify it a bit & make some quick bit of extra money!! The two biggest providers of email service plan to dish out a service under which a sender can pay a fee to have its email bypass the anti-spam filters and go straight to the inbox of a Yahoo! or AOL email account, being labelled as a “legitimate” email!! So those sons of pest advertisers have another tool to sneak their stuff into our inboxes!!

What is spam, one should ask!! I consider an unsolicited email, most likely an advertisement or a sales pitch which I didn’t ask for, to be spam. It does not matter to me whether that email is from some pill dealer or car dealer. But these two companies certainly doesn’t think that way, since they probably consider only pill, software, viagra emails to be spam!! So an advertiser with a decent advertising budget can send out emails to quite a number of people, having the guarantee that his spammy sales pitch will indeed land into the inboxes of his victims instead of being caught up by the anti-spam filters!! :tdown: Sure there’s a positive side to this in a way as some legitimate senders will be able to make sure that important emails do get delivered to recepients, like banks etc. but history has shown that loose ended offerings have been abused far often than they’ve been put to good use, active-x and javascript are the two best examples I can think of, which still sting us now and then and pretty badly too, even though they were not meant to cause any harm, rather make web an experience worthy of rememberance!!

So, will they start selling our email addresses to advertisers next?

Source: Yahoo! News (how ironic)