AOL/Yahoo E-mail Certification Fees Don't Make Cents

In an age where spam is as prevalent as high-speed Internet access - or somewhere close to such - many Internet services providers (ISP's) are trying everything they can think of to fight back and keep web surfers' e-mail inboxes from becoming so overloaded that they cannot get to their news alerts, online correspondence with friends and family, messages to and from coworkers, and so forth. But just these past few weeks, a crazy idea to solve the spam problem, introduced at America Online and Yahoo, appears to have taken the idea of unsolicited e-mail sorting a little too far. And it just happens to be one of the worst ideas ever conceived to keep the information highway running smoothly. Maybe even the definite worst ever. And the idea might well fail just for that.

Why is this so? Basically, AOL and Yahoo, like Microsoft's MSN beforehand, made the decision to introduce an e-mail sorting option based on certification. But unlike MSN's certification solution, which the Vole refers to as Sender ID, AOL and Yahoo charge a fee for certification of e-mail - effectively creating a prepaid postage requirement for bulk e-mail that spammers theoretically could not pay for without shooting themselves in the proverbial foot. The idea is great in theory, but I shall expect it to be bad in practice. And that's because spammers have done everything they can to get around the best of spam defenses - and will likely continue to do so for quite some time.