At 09:22 2006-02-09 -0600, Chris Barnes wrote:
I am sending this to every email list to which I subscribe - because
most of them use the Listserv software written by Eric Thomas.
How is that relevant to AOL/Yahoo? Just because you want to disperse
someone's opinion all over the globe?
FTR, the procmail discussion list is managed on MAILMAN, which is rather
clear if you check the headers. Quite a number of other lists I
participate on are either mailman or majordomo. I haven't seen a whole lot
of Listerve in the past decade...
slightest degree. Also realize that what he says of the Goodmail
program's impact on Listserv lists, will also affect lists run by other
A site on which I admin has already been discussing blocking s*bscriptions
from AOL users if their new method results in rejected mail. We've locally
blacklisted AOL on several occasions in the past to deal with AOL blocking
us (we're not in their "Enhanced whitelist"), because their users will
start emailing the lists asking "are the lists up?" "I haven't seen any
messages for a few days" and the like, but never actually see their own
posts or the replies (not to mention it's wildly off-topic for the
site). Blocking THEIR mail from entering the site, and providing a URL
reference to an incident writeup on our website allows us to keep their
innane babbling off the list and notify them that the reason they haven't
seen messages is because their ISP is blocking them. AOL has _NEVER_
provided us with a complaint or ANYTHING explaining why the server ends up
in their blacklist. We don't relay, we're secured, we don't even accept
HTML messages or attachments.
Anyone who has looked into the AOL/Yahoo Goodmail arrangement should easily
recognize that this program is targeting so-called "opt-in" advertising.
IMO, AOL just wants a piece of the action.
L-Soft has joined the growing number of companies that protest against
AOL's recent announcement that it will phase out its Enhanced Whitelist
Something I'm happy the site I admin on didn't bend over backwards to
participate in. One of the many criteria for getting on the AOL Enhanced
Whitelist was to have a recipient-unique one-click uns*bscribe link, which
meant that the list processor would have to make each message unique,
increasing list network traffic many fold. All for the benefit of morons
who can't find a real ISP.
service in June in favour of Goodmail CertifiedEmail, which carries an
as yet unspecified per-message fee.
Which chiefly ASSURES delivery - the crux of it is that spammers won't pay
someone to deliver their mail, so by merit of paying GoodMail (and by
extension, AOL), even without evaluating the content of the messages, they
can generally be considered legitimate junkmail. Not being on GoodMail
doesn't mean you won't be able to send into AOL.
Figure it this way: If AOL were really enforcing that ALL senders had to
pay money to send to AOL, a lot of ISPs would happily oblige to *NOT* do
this, because it'll increase their OWN market share as people flock away
from AOL so they can exchange emails. How many AOL users will fail to
receive their eBay bid notices, legitimate business inquiries, etc? If
it's as heinous as you say, AOL will ditch it soon enough, or flounder
(moreso than they have been lately).
subscribers, others will end up in junk folders. Yahoo is expected
to follow down the same path.
Yahoo actually inked their deal months ago. There wasn't a bunch of hoopla
over that, probably because Yahoo is providing a freebie mail service - but
the AOL users are PAYING for their service.
against spam. Knowing that message such and such genuinely comes from
its purported sender can help improve the accuracy of your spam filter.
Though the goodmail setup isn't really per-message sender auth. As an
individual user at XYZ ISP, your own identity wouldn't likely be
verified. As the operator of a large marketing list, your LIST identity
would be known.
certificate fees. I also find that the "rumoured" rates that have
been mentioned in some of the press articles are totally out of
proportion with the service being provided.
Compare to a bulk mailers typical actual postage fees if they were to
deliver advertising to you via postal mail.
The fee is several times what providers currently charge for the
service of hosting the mailing list, removing dead addresses, making
backups, etc. As an illustration, a typical hobby list would cost on the
order of $500-1000 a year.
I dunno what constities a typical hobby list. The figures I've seen are
US$0.005 to US$0.01 per message (taken to be PER RECIPIENT at the goodmail
affiliate). I admin on a site which has about 2500 messages a week on it's
various discussion lists (not including bounces and other administrative
stuff). We've got 425 AOL.COM addresses, 6 cs.com, amd 14 at netscape.net,
for a total of 445 AOL'ers - if we assume average distribution is to a mere
10% of them (45 per message), that is 62,500 AOL-bound messages each _week_
* 52 (weeks in a year) = 3.25 million delivered messages to AOL (based on a
10% saturation across the multiple lists). Times even a quarter of a cent
per = US$8,125 per year.
... IF we were subject to the whole goodmail thing.
Raise your hand if you think that losing AOL'ers from the net would be a
great loss.
cost $10k or more a year. This may not be much for the advertisement
manager of a large company, not when compared to print adverts, but
whatabout the rest of us?
The rest of us are not the target of the goodmail program. Do some better
research before crossposting your propoganda across the internet.
I shudder to think how your panties would bunch up if you were to hear that
AOL reportedly gets kickbacks from the goodmail deal.
A bigger problem I see is the potential for an outfit such as goodmail to
hold other sites for ransom - arrange to have AOL block all ebay, paypal,
and financial institution emails because they're frequently used in
phishing scams, then contact these outfits to tell them that they can
assure delivery of their legitimate traffic by contracting with goodmail.
AOL has its head up it's hindquarters, because they could have easily
implemented SPF checking, and encouraged various large institutions to set
up SPF records for their domains. I don't use SPF for my inbound mail, but
I've published SPF records for quite some time.
knowing full well that they would go out of business in a matter
of months were their access to AOL and Yahoo mailboxes to be cut off
Why would ISPs go out of business if their access to AOL were cut off?
Don't you realize that AOL *USERS* will get miffed with AOL for rejecting
mail from their friends, family, and business associates?
---
Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering
Procmail disclaimer: <http://www.professional.org/procmail/disclaimer.html>
Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies. I'll get my copy from the list.
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