Fergie's Tech Blog

AOL, Yahoo! Follow Bill Gates: 'We Don't See No Steenking Spam'

Via eMail Battles.

Unless you sleep under a rock, you've heard that AOL and Yahoo have decided to open their very own postal service for spammers. Pony up half a penny per message and you, too, can send unwanted email with guaranteed delivery that bypasses spam filters.

Yahoo's Antispam Product Manager Miles Libbey claims the Goodmail service is aimed at de-phishing transactional messages, like financial docs. As an apparent afterthought, Libbey muses, "We need to ensure that the spammers don't sign up for the service." (Who's a spammer? Anybody who doesn't buy the service.)

AOL's chief web strategist Barry Appelman agrees. He's convinced himself that adding a new revenue source will somehow magically "widen the gap between the amount of good email we want our users to get and the dwindling amount of bad email they might get." (Huh?)

posted by Fergie @ 2/09/2006 08:44:00 AM