Apologies to those who consider this off topic, but if you are e member of a Yahoo Group [model rail has any number] and receive e-mails or even the dreaded digest download the link below will provide some interesting reading. This silly idea needs to be nipped in the bud before it catches hold and spreads. The free Fred Langa newsletter contains some further [quite robust] explanation of this latest greed fuelled stupidity. Fred's letter can be found at Langa.com.
The charge will only be for emails you want sent to AOL or Yahoo customers without going via their spam filters. There will be no charge for sending emails if you are an AOL customer, nor will there be a charge for using yahoo groups (we get enough adverts from yahoo!).
I don't know how others feel about this but I can tell you that the present system is a nightmare and really does need an overhaul.
For example, my ISP (ntl:) regularly refuses legitimate email from legitimate end users of Yahoo (and hence BTInternet), Freeserve/Wanadoo and others because they (ntl:) subscribe to a service called Spamhaus (among others) that blacklists various mail servers for various reasons. Once a mail server is on a blacklist it can be several weeks before the owner can get it off, and that means that for those weeks no one who uses that ISP mail service can email anyone who's ISP uses Spamhaus to identify spamers. A lot of legitimate (email about our exhibition for example) thus falls into a black hole and the sender may or may not get told about it.
As far as I can see these two articles refer to high volume users (e.g. the Screwfix newsletter) being asked to pay for their mail to be certified rather than junked and thus should not affect normal end users. I am, however, open to be corrected about this by anyone more knowledgeable.
Well I receive some four hundred e-mails per day and less than 2% which are spam actually get onto my laptop. I have a completely open mail feed and run my own mail server. Strangely of the discarded spam some 17% originates from AOL servers. They are of course doing everything that they can to stop the spammers [not] These people fail miserably to keep their own house in order.
I assume then that you are forced to use their services?
Censorship - and make no mistake that is precisely what this is, tends to do that. False positives are the bane of all kinds of filter, but across the board blacklisting of servers is the height of stupidity. Mind you that is to be expected of NTL with their wonderful proxy [sounds better without the R] servers and lashed up infrastructure.
It is - like the governments identity card system the thin end of a very wide blunt wedge. The Internet was built on freedom of communication and being gradually converted by the greedy and inanely stupid to a global sales tool has caused a great many problems and will undoubtedly continue to do so.
Whoops I have just received a spam mailing from Yahoo about their valentine crap :0) The penalty of taking Yahoo groups unfiltered
Thats correct. Bulk emailers will have to sign up to a code of conduct, and those who dont, will see their emails blocked. One of the common tricks for spammers is to use trojan software to hijack PC's and use them to send email. This will (should) prevent that.
For those that worry about being charged for sending email, bear in mind that these companies are in business to make money. If that means they charge to send emails, then they will. Just as Vodafone charges for its customers to send text messages. If you dont like the charges, you can change supplier.
Any ISP who outsources their spam filtering to an unaccountable/uncontactable organisation is, in my opinion, extremely irresponsible! It commercial suicide and incredibly high risk for an ISP to let someone else filter mail for it!
A couple of years back the osirusoft blacklist (of Jo Jared which now no longer exists) put a block on the first two numbers of an IP address and put *.* as the last two. This had the effect of blocking Optus, one of the main upstream providers here in Australia and caused half of Australia's ISPs to be blocked around the world!
In principal, block lists are a good idea. In practice, they don't work.
If an ISP wants mail filtering, it should do it itself.
Have the option to sign up and pay for a premium service whereby their "trusted" e-mail will bypass AOL or Yahoo filtering and end up in the recipients inbox that little bit sooner.
They'll only be blocked if deemed to be spam. Otherwise they do not get the premium service and will be delayed as they go through the spam and virus filtering.
The whole thing seems to be a storm in a teacup. No one is suggesting ordinary users will be asked to pay for sending or receiving e-mail. No one is suggesting any mails other than those deemed spam or virus will be blocked.
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