America Online says it plans to begin offering a new pay-to-send email system to customers within the next 30 days, despite growing criticism from a diverse group of organizations claiming AOL’s plan amounts to a de-facto “email tax.”
AOL plans to launch the system, run by Goodmail, through which advertisers and other senders would pay a fee (from roughly ¼ to 1 cent per message) to guarantee their messages will successfully reach AOL subscribers. Paid messages would bypass AOL’s spam filtering technologies and arrive in users’ mailboxes certified as legitimate. Yahoo is also planning to institute a similar service via Goodmail for transactional messages (such as account statements, policy notifications, and receipts) in “the coming months,” although AOL will be the first out of the gate.
