Dannic, The Prince of Cats

Posted by Dannic on February 5th, 2006 in Rants

It was only a matter of time. I have been predicting this for quite some time now. AOL and Yahoo are now looking at a program they hope will earn them millions of dollars a year.

are about to start using a system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from a quarter of a cent to 1 cent each to have them delivered. — International Herald Tribune

What does this mean for those users? It means that they will now get spam from companies that would have been caught by the spam filters. Now those emails will bypass the spam filters altogether and go straight to the inbox.

On AOL, for example, they will go straight to users’ main mailboxes and will not have to pass the gauntlet of spam filters that could divert them to a special bulk e-mail box or strip them of images and Web links.

Of course, they claim it will help them identify legitimate spammers. To me it doesn’t matter if they pay or not. I don’t want it either way. It is only a matter of time before others such as MSN jump onto the bandwagon.

Of course, neither of these companies offer an email client with spam identifying technology. They generally rely on the the user to provide any additional filtering through the email client. In most cases this is the default Microsoft Outlook express or Outlook.

Fortunately, there is a solution to this that not many know about yet. Thunderbird will help you with filtering and is a much better client than Outlook Express and is comparable to Outlook. If you are worried about spam, I would suggest looking into this email client from the same people who have created Firefox.

If you use AOL or Yahoo, I would highly suggest you consider using alternative Email services such as Gmail.

For those of you who do not have Gmail yet, Contact me with an email address and I will send you an Invite.