Activists Challenge AOL's Bulk Email Fees

By Yinka Adegoke

Four years ago, a small e-mail campaign saved a struggling coffee shop in Portland, Oregon.

Today proprietor Becky Bilyeu is among the thousands of people fighting to preserve the free flow of electronic mail.

Bilyeu contacted the MoveOn.org political advocacy group earlier this spring when she heard that Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, the largest U.S. Internet service provider, planned to start charging for guaranteed delivery of certain types of bulk e-mail.

The fee -- a small fraction of a cent per e-mail -- took effect two weeks ago. AOL says it will help stop spam, or junk messages, from clogging their customers' inboxes.

But many say e-mail should move freely so that people can build and maintain large communities over the Web. Nearly 500 organizations, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to the Gun Owners of America, have joined together to create a coalition called DearAOL.com

The coalition predicts Internet service providers could effectively end up taxing nonprofit organizations and charities for e-mail in the same way that businesses now are by AOL.

AOL vigorously disputes the claim.

"There will be no requirement, ever, for not-for-profits who deliver e-mail to AOL members to pay for e-mail certification and delivery," spokesman Nicholas Graham said.

Still, the controversy prompted California state Sen. Dean Florez, a Democrat, to hold a hearing on the fee structure in early April. A Senate committee plans to monitor the AOL program and could take the company and its vendor to task if nonprofit groups start experiencing widespread delivery problems.

Meanwhile, Bilyeu, 39, says small businesses should also be exempt from the new policy.

In 2002, she turned to the 50 subscribers of her weekly e-mail newsletter to let them know that financial troubles could force her coffee shop to close. Over the next four days, they donated more than $3,000 -- enough to keep her business afloat.

Facing off against formidable competitors like Starbucks Corp., she still relies on her e-mail list to keep her customers coming back.

"I don't make any money so I can't afford to pay to send out e-mail," she said. " ... I don't want to have to pay to guarantee (that customers) get my little newsletter when I'm already paying AOL $15 a month."

CIRCUMVENTING SPAM

For e-mail providers like AOL, the challenge is stopping spam and phishing e-mails, which trick users into revealing passwords and financial information, without preventing legitimate bulk messages from getting through. The company believes the answer is e-mail that it authenticates in return for a fee from the sender.

AOL worked with a company called Goodmail to offer certified e-mail. The service ensures the delivery of images and hyperlinks on most high-volume mailings.

Graham, the AOL spokesman, said the program was going well, and the company expected more senders to use it to transmit important e-mails, such as financial information, to its members.

Yahoo Inc. is also testing Goodmail, strictly for what it calls "transactional" messages, such as bank statements and purchase receipts. The Web portal company said it had no plans to charge customers to send and receive such e-mails.

Consumer activists, however, say any move to charge for e-mail will eventually lead to a two-tier system that would stifle communication in organizations that have benefited from free delivery.

The Association of Cancer Online Resources, which sends out more than

1.5 million e-mails a week to patients around the world, has been a prominent supporter of DearAOL.com. Founder Gilles Frydman said he was driven by a desire for "open standards" on the Web as e-mail has helped patients and health officials access free medical research on cancer treatments around the world.

Frydman said free e-mail had helped the association, which relies on private donations, to "do tremendous work for very little."

Kay Barre, pastor of St Paul's United Methodist Church in Tarzana, California, said she sometimes sent up to a dozen messages a week to her parishioners.

"Some church organizations have thousands of members on their e-lists," she said. "How can they ever afford these kinds of fees? In the first place, how does having a company pay a fee to bypass spam filters solve the spam problem?"

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an activist body for the protection of consumers' digital rights, acknowledges the challenge of coping with spam while maintaining free e-mail. But activism coordinator Danny O'Brien doesn't see the new fees as a solution.

In fact, he said Internet service providers could establish the fees as a revenue stream and not work so hard on their spam filters.

"If people paid Goodmail and not the ISPs," O'Brien said, "then you'd have this separation of powers because the ISPs would still be incentivized to reduce the amount of spam they're getting."

Copyright 2006 Reuters Limited.

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. Hundreds of new articles daily. And, discuss this and other topics in our forum at (or) For more news and headlines from Reuters, please go to: [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Let's see now ... a 'fraction of a penny' per each piece of email might cost all of a dollar or so on a large mailing such as a church. It _might_ (not sure of the figures here) cost this Digest all of a dollar per day. Oh my goodness, that is really going to bankrupt me! (sarcasm mode). I wonder why the coffee shop owner mentioned or the pastor are not placing the blame where it really belongs, on the spammers/scammers who made it all a reality? Why are they choosing to blame AOL? Is it an easier target? AOL is just flowing with the times, the way things are these days. I can tell you that if the spam is not cut back it is going to make it very difficult to continue this Digest. I would be glad to pay a buck or two to have the spam eliminated or greatly cut back. PAT]