Posted: 10th May, 2006 By: MarkJ
AOL has sent the first piece of advertising through its new 'Goodmail' system, which many have criticised. Under the system, advertisers can pay to have their e-mails allowed through the ISP's junk filter:
The programme has come under attack from not-for-profit organisations lead by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The AOL programme instead of solving the spam problem could cause an increase in the number of legitimate messages getting blocked by "spam filters gone wild", argued Danny O'Brien, Activism Coordinator with the EFF.
"With AOL's system in place, AOL will be taking money from big companies to skip those filters entirely. If ISPs can make money for a premium service that evades their malfunctioning filters, we worry that they won't fix those filters for groups who do not pay."The system also appears to completely neglect the fact that users do not want SPAM, any kind of SPAM.
It's hard to see how deliberately allowing junk and profiteering from that will actually improve the situation; it's simply a way to ignore the problems that persist with existing technology, as opposed to solving them. More @
VNUNet.