Mon, 06 Feb 2006

Plan to charge for e-mail triggers outcry

I don't necessarily like this, either, but I certainly understand the motivation behind it. And no, I don't think these companies are trying to scam commercial customers: I honestly believe that they're trying cut down on spam. If you think that SPAM is annoying when it shows up in your inbox, consider the network costs of the shitstorm: these guys are paying through the nose for con artists to bombard and annoy their customers.

The problem is pricing. While I sincerely wish that the Postal Service would consdier the same approach, I fear that they already have, and have found themselves dependent on junk (snail) mail to subsidize the rest of the operations. And if the price is set too low, that's exactly what will happen here.

America Online's plan to start charging businesses to send commercial e-mail messages is creating an uproar among some marketers, according to a published report.

(link) [CNN.com]

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Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
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