[richlevy]

From here.

<nyt_headline version="1.0" type=" ">Postage Is Due for Companies Sending E-Mail </nyt_headline>

<nyt_byline version="1.0" type=" "> </nyt_byline> by PAUL HANSELL
Published: February 5, 2006
<!--NYT_INLINE_IMAGE_POSITION1 --> <nyt_text> </nyt_text>Companies will soon have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp if they want to be certain that their e-mail will be delivered to many of their customers.

America Online and Yahoo, two of the world's largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered. The senders must promise to contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages, or risk being blocked entirely.

Now Yahoo is a free service, but AOL isn't. If this is simply a case of putting a 'preferred' sticker on certain items, then this isn't really new. If you do a directory search in the Yellow Pages online, preferred advertisers are given a special section above local merchants.

If however, they attempt to degrade e-mail delivery from companies who don't pay, this is a huge issue for paying customers. Not just sales circulars that we want to receive, but important commercial responses such as registration confirmations, e-mails about flight or subscription/account cancellations might be purposely delayed to blackmail companies to sign up for 'preffered' service.

For a free service like Yahoo, the answer is that you get what you pay for. For AOL, if I found out that an important confirmation or cancellation notice from an airline was dumped as spam even though I had previously received them, I would drop AOL like a hot rock.