You've got good mail

Businesses are fuming over AOL's plan to charge for sending e-mail to its users. But if it cuts spam and guarantees delivery, what's the problem?

By Farhad Manjoo

Read more: Technology & Business, E-Mail, America Online, Farhad Manjoo

March 2, 2006 | It's strange to witness Craig Newmark, the soft-spoken, left-leaning founder of the eponymous classified ad Web site, share a podium and strike up a common cause with Larry Pratt, the tough-talking head of Gun Owners of America, which bills itself, proudly, as "the only no-compromise gun lobby in Washington." Then there's the odd couple of Eli Pariser, the passionately partisan executive director of MoveOn.org, and Gilles Frydman, who runs the Association of Cancer Online Resources, which is ardently non-partisan and non-political. Far from being natural bedfellows, they joined together on Tuesday to fight a scourge they say threatens each of them alike: AOL's plan to impose what they describe as a "tax" on e-mail.

The word choice is a bit of an obfuscation -- or, as America Online says, a deliberate and gross misrepresentation of a prudent idea. What the critics call a tax is AOL's plan to charge organizations a fee to guarantee their e-mail messages are delivered to AOL customers -- and not caught up in spam folders or mistaken for fraudulent e-mail.

Under the plan, which takes effect within 30 days, AOL insists that its standard, free e-mail system will not change; nobody who wants to send e-mail to AOL users would be compelled to pay any fee. But if companies that prove they aren't spammers -- such as banks or Internet retailers that have an existing relationship with an AOL user -- pay AOL about a quarter-penny per e-mail, their messages would bypass AOL's spam filters and land directly in AOL users' in boxes. E-mail that has been paid for would be stamped "AOL Certified," a sign to customers that the message has been vetted by AOL and has been deemed safe.

E-mail, after all, is under assault. AOL users and the rest of us are constantly bombarded by spam and, more perniciously, "phishing" messages, which appear to be from legitimate companies but have actually been sent by people looking to steal your personal information. Nobody trusts e-mail anymore, especially e-mail that concerns money. Because trickery is endemic to e-mail, according to some studies, people regularly ignore messages from banks, credit card companies, online commercial sites like eBay and Paypal, and nonprofit organizations such as the Red Cross.

"Consumers have a hard time telling what's authentic and what's not," says Richard Gingras, the CEO of Goodmail Systems, the company that will be running AOL's paid e-mail program. The AOL plan, Gingras says, will bring some measure of order to the lawlessness of the common e-mail in box.

AOL's critics recognize the company is trying to address a real problem, but the prescription, they say, is worse than the disease. The plan is the "first step down the very slippery slope of dividing the Internet into two classes of users -- those who pay for preferential treatment and those who are left behind with unreliable service," says Adam Green, the civic communications director for MoveOn.org.

AOL, like many large e-mail providers, currently spends large sums to keep the Internet's free e-mail system running well (or running at all), employing engineers and systems administrators who man the front lines of the war against e-mail tricksters. But once AOL begins charging companies for e-mail, Green says, it will no longer have any reason to maintain the free e-mail service. He adds that an unreliable, free e-mail service might actually benefit AOL, as it would provide a greater incentive for firms to pay for guaranteed delivery to AOL users.

The loser in this scheme, critics say, would be groups that can't afford to pay. "The ultimate question we've been asking ourselves is, after AOL's e-mail tax goes into effect, will the little guy be able to turn a small idea into a big idea on the Internet?" Green says. "If somebody starts a Web site around some community problem or cause and gets several thousand people to sign up for an e-mail list, and then tries to send e-mail that consistently goes into an ever-deteriorating spam filter -- that's a barrier to entry on the Internet."

MoveOn is one of the largest groups in a coalition of more than 50 organizations that have banded together to stop AOL's e-mail scheme. This week, the diverse collection -- it spans the partisan spectrum, and includes many non-political groups -- launched a Web site at dearaol.com to collect signatures of people opposed to the idea. Some critics of the plan threaten dire consequences for AOL if it goes ahead with certified e-mail. Pratt, of Gun Owners of America, says his group would call for a boycott of the company to protest the move. On Tuesday, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, who runs the lefty political blog Daily Kos, suggested that he might block AOL users from his site as punishment for its e-mail idea.

Despite the coalition's rhetoric -- the use of the word "tax" appears to be deliberately misleading -- it's not clear that AOL's plan would gravely threaten e-mail. In fact, it may improve it. The groups opposed to the program offer what amounts to a hypothesis rather than a certainty: They outline a scenario in which, under certain circumstances, AOL's plan could result in the end of e-mail as we know it. Indeed, there is some truth to their hypothesis that, if not closely monitored, AOL's plan could prompt the giant Internet service provider to reduce the amount it invests in keeping free e-mail working effectively. On the other hand, the danger of breaking e-mail already seems moot. If you've got to spend much of your time and mental energy on the lookout for dangerous messages lurking in your daily flood of mail, isn't e-mail already broken?

Next page: Cancer group: AOL could prevent patients from getting lifesaving e-mails