New charges for e-mail broadcasts?

Dave,

At MailAgent we have been watching this for a while and there is a lot of mis-information from what we are hearing.

Recently the BBC picked up on the fact that AOL and Yahoo were going to made suppliers pay for all successful delivery.  But it seems this is untrue.

I am just running out of the door for the TFCM show, but the following snippet from an email from GoodMail themselves to me last night might help explain the situation:


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Robert,


We will not be extending our Charter Program to Europe initially. We anticipate do so in the end of 2006 or early 2007. I still thought you might be interested in the following:



We are been very encouraged in the interest in the program from commercial senders, non-profit senders and ESPs. We want to make sure that there is complete clarity on delivery policy at AOL in case there was some misunderstanding:



Whitelist. The whitelist at AOL is not being changed, reduced or even under consideration for being changed. There will be no degradation in the privileges received by these senders today. It was thought by some that small and medium sized senders on the AOL whitelist will have to adopt CertifiedEmail immediately or face losing delivery capability. This is not the case. 

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Basically the way I see it is that if you are good enough to get through now (we are onthe EWL so this seems to be more than sufficient) that will continue.  If you are not, or the customer will pay the extra, then this is a good scheme.

The interesting point is that the info I have read means that people are going to have to stump up to 1c "per email"  - not per thousand.   This could double your costs for a volume of AOL and Yahoo users............

Regards

Robert Hurst

MailAgent Limited
http://www.mailagent.co.uk

On 12:57:37 6 February 2006 DaveChaffey wrote:

 

According to this NY Times article: Yahoo! has followed AOL in announcing yesterday that it will start trialling the GoodMail system which involves a payment of 2-3 cents / 1000 e-mails to the web-mail company receiving e-mails in return for guaranteed delivery to the

I was wondering whether any of the E-mail Service Providers who monitor this list know whether this will just affect Yahoo!/AOL in US or whether it will affect UK and when??

This has been mooted for some time as an approach in the battle against SPAM since the spammers aren't going to pay this and at this price it still compares favourably with postal mail.

The approach is similar, but more costly to the Bonded Sender scheme used by Hotmail which charges a flat fee of no more than $20,000 per year.

From the POV of the web-mail players this looks to be a common strategy. It increases the relevance of messages to their users, reduces their costs in processing or certainly storing SPAM and may even! be seen as an income stream.

While they won't currently block permission-based e-mailers (or spammers) who haven't paid for this they may direct those who haven't paid to the junk folders, which is as good as blocking. In the next few years, they may block broadcasters who aren't signed up completely.

I expect to see corporates signing up to something similar also.

Certainly one to monitor for e-mail marketers.

Dave Chaffey
E-mail marketing resources : www.davechaffey.com