Four More ISPs To Make Marketers Pay Up Because Their Spam Filters Don't Work

from the what's-the-price-of-nothing-these-days dept

A little more than a year ago, AOL and Yahoo said they'd start using a service from a company called Goodmail, which would let marketers pay a fee to bypass their spam filters. The idea wasn't to allow spammers to get through by paying, but rather to let senders of legitimate commercial messages ensure their messages were received by AOL and Yahoo users, though that didn't stop the backlash. Now comes word that four more ISPs -- Comcast, Cox, Time Warner and Verizon -- will use the system (via Broadband Reports). While this will probably provoke another strong response, it appears to be a relative non-issue, and just a pointless service the ISPs and vendors are trying to sell. A Verizon spokesman notes that it will still whitelist companies' messages for free, but the Goodmail service exists "for those that want approval at multiple ISPs at once." Of course, the real solution would be just to get better spam filters that don't block so many legitimate messages, but why bother when you can charge for this sort of service instead?