A little while ago AOL decided to charge organisations and companies for guaranteed delivery of fully-hyperlinked and imaged emails in users’ inboxes.

A New York Times article described it as “a major change in the economics of the Internet”.

Many saw this a bad thing. Some because it looks like a naked grab for cash , others because it creates a two-tier email system, others because they view it as an attack on free speech (SpamHaus too), others because it might be anti-competitive, putting another squeeze on small businesses but easily absorbed by larger corporations.

Seth Godin, however, puts his head up above the parapet and provides a robust defence of the idea.

It’s all about friction, apparently. He concludes that everyone’s a winner. The only people who will lose are spammers and marketers who measure tonnage.AOL, Yahoo!, delivery assurance, email, stamps, spammers, goodmail, metrics, friction

Sarven Capadisli provides a list of fourteen ways to frustrate email harvesters and spammers by hiding an email address published on a web site or blog.

Many of these were entirely new to me.

If you blog or run a web site, you may want to check it out.email harvesters, spam, spammers, email address, hiding, web site, blog

Ever wondered exactly how spammers / advertisers (and everyone in between) try to hook you on the content of their HTML emails with sneaky, sneaky tricks / clever design?

An article on Campaign Monitor (“a place for development news, tips, tricks and talk on email newsletters and list management”) outlines “the key email design trends and guidelines” for marketing with HTML emails.

Perversely, some of it is interesting.

You can see Apple’s iTunes newsletters get a roasting for poor design.

You can learn that 75% of people who use preview panes like horizontal ones and only 25% prefer the vertical “Outlook 2003″ layout and discover which email clients and ISPs block images and which do not.

You can read the comments (which are a bit of a hoot).

You can ponder again the many reasons why HTML email is a bad idea.

Pitched with feisty slogans like “Sp@mX Fights Back, One Spammer In The Slammer!” and “stops spam and phishing at the source”, Sp@mX traces and reports spammers to their Internet Service Providers.

The reporting process itself is automated and simple. The company that develops the software plans to use it to put at least one spammer in jail by the end of 2006 and to bankrupt the most “spammer-friendly” ISP in the USA.

Does it make a difference? Who knows? Judging by the comments on MacUpdate and VersionTracker, some users feel that they are fighting back by using it, and that’s not nothing.

Sp@mX costs USD 19.95 and is available from the developer’s web site.