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

AOL now charges companies and organizations money to ensure that their emails arrive in AOL members’ inboxes.

Previously AOL used a free IP-based “Enhanced White List”. Senders that observed best practice in their email habits could be (mostly) sure that their emails would reach AOL customers.

According to a report on ClickZNews , companies must now sign up for accreditation with Goodmail, an “email delivery assurance business” that charges “accredited companies a fraction of a cent per message sent”. Otherwise their emails may not arrive, or will arrive with hyperlinks and images disabled.

Slashdot reports that Yahoo is expected to follow suit.

Is this a bad thing? An investor in a rival delivery assurance company thinks so

And so it’s a sad day for email. The spammers have won. They have turned email delivery into a business that can be bought and sold for the highest price.

Or is it a win for customers in the end, as AOL Postmaster Charles Stiles says in the ClickZNews report?

Our focus and goal here is to provide a safer and more secure environment for our consumers, and restore some trust in the e-mail inbox.

UPDATE: According to the New York Times , the charge for using this new service ranges between .25 and 1 cent an email.

The article also suggests that

the move to create what is essentially a preferred class of e-mail is a major change in the economics of the Internet.

email, spam, delivery assurance, AOL, yahoo, whitelist, Internet, email in general

User reports on the beta version of Microsoft‘s Hotmail replacement, Windows Live Mail, are beginning to filter out. It is part of a wider online revamp by Microsoft called Windows Live.

You can see some pictures of the interface on Vinny Carpenter’s blog and at Tipmonkies.

Reviews range from “awesome” to “pretty good” to cautiously welcoming and mixed to damning (There must be one. I just can’t find it).

Two Mad Geeks compare it to Yahoo! Mail and Zimbra.

In a move that may surprise many doom-sayers (like me) who fret about Google, Gmail and privacy, the search engine company has refused a request from the US Department of Justice for information about the search habits of Google users.

It’s important to recognise that the DoJ only asked for “de-identified” data, aggregated statistics that cannot be linked to individual users. Yahoo!, MSN and AOL all happily complied with the request.

But Google refused, partly because it fears turning the information over will create the public perception that Google doesn’t protect the privacy of its users.

Leslie Walker at the Washington Post has written a very interesting article in response on what exactly Google does know about individual users. Or you could browse the 934 hits on the story at Google News.

In further Google-realated privacy news, Gmail has introduced a more visible delete button. This gives users the impression that they can delete emails from the Gmail system.

Certainly the button removes the messages from the web interface, but whether it really means that they have gone, or whether they lurk around in Google’s massive data collection system is another matter. Gmail’s privacy statement is not clear about that.

Whoops, there I go again….

Yahoo! Mail now offers users the option of a second email address, which may contain a “.” (full stop or period).

Apparently the new addresses are being snapped up quickly. One blogger reports that his firstname.secondname@yahoo.com address was already taken. So hurry over if you are a Yahoo! Mail user.

Mac users with Yahoo! Mail accounts are well catered for. YMail offers Yahoo-specific menubar notification and you can download your Yahoo emails into Mail.app with either MacFreePOPs or MailForward.

If three of the most powerful people in the world of web-based email — Paul Buchheit (Google), Kevin Doerr (Microsoft) and Ethan Diamond (Yahoo!) — came to dinner, what would they talk about?

Gmail, of course!

Wall Street Journal columnist Lee Gomes invited the three webmail chiefs to dinner and writes up what happened.

Many SBC Global/Yahoo users like René are having trouble collecting their POP mail.

They receive this message:

The POP server “pop.swbell.yahoo.com” rejected the password for user “myaccount@swbell.net”

or the polling attempt just times out.

MaxFixIt has collected a number of user experiences. It also offers four work-arounds while SBC Global/Yahoo tries to fix the problem:

1. Set Mail.app to poll for messages every 30 minutes instead of every five or one.
2. Delete existing keychain entries for SBC Global/Yahoo
3. Click “Cancel” on the error dialog and allow Apple Mail to try again by itself later.
4. Use your full email address as your user name.

(SBC Global/Yahoo is a large ISP in the USA. Customers at the following franchises/affiliates are affected: SBC Global Ameritech, SBC Global Flash, SBC Global NVBell, SBC Global Pacbell, SBC Global Prodigy, SBC Global SNet, SBC Global SWBell, SBC Global Wans and SBC Global Yahoo!)