AOL/Yahoo: our email tax will make the net as good as the post office!
…Just as good as postal mail. Hooray. Of course, you can always just tell your friends that they have to cancel their email accounts with their local ISPs and switch to AOL. I wonder if Yahoo will pay me $0.0025 for every email I receive at my mail server from Yahoo subscribers? I could clean up! Or is it only giant oligopolies that get to tax the rest of the Internet?…
(Via Boing Boing.)
You’ve got to be kidding me. But strangely, they are not kidding.
Check out the NY Times article
As someone who has to deal with a-o-hell’s crap due to the nature of my business (web design/hosting/marketing), I can tell you that this move will do absolutely nothing to prevent spam whatsoever. It is pure and simple a profit mechanism which borders on extortion. America Online uses such strange spam filters that very often legitimate email goes undelivered. If for some strange reason you are still using AOL, please, I beg you, do the world a favor and get a Gmail account. Or better yet, buy your own domain (even your name if available), and start using an email address which will never be dependent on your ISP and will never change. I think many people stay with AOL just because they don’t want to change their email address.
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