Paid email scheme not designed to stop spam

Goodmail, which is involved in the creation of the CertifiedEmail programme, outlined its ideas to the Senate Select Committee on E-Commerce, Wireless Technology and Consumer Driven Programming this week.

CEO Richard Gingras dropped a bit of a bombshell when he said that its fee-based CertifiedEmail program was not meant to reduce spam.

Gingras claimed that the point of the plan is to allow users to verify who important messages are really from, like a message from your bank or credit card company. Senator Dean Florez, a Democrat who chairs the committee said that he thought that was the whole idea of the program, which would charge people to send spam to AOL and Yahoo users.

So did we, but according to Gingras no one ever said that was the goal of CertifiedEmail.

Well not exactly. AOL did say that CertifedEmail was anti-spam and anti-phishing to at least one media outlet.

Some groups are concerned that their emails, some of them for good causes, will be stopped unless they pay to CertifiedEmail.

AOL has offered to pay for non-profit organisations CertifiedEmail expenses if that happens.

Originally the idea was to charge postage for email, but this scheme has been dropped in favour of one which only charges companies. So it probably will not work on spam sent by Bots as these come from home users.

More here. µ