Last month it came to light that AOL was planning on instigating a new mail service for its subscribers based on Goodmail's "CertifiedEmail". There has been an angry uprising from a coalition of mostly-righteous groups such as the EFF, MoveOn, Friends of the Earth in response, with some participants claiming AOL is essentially putting a tax on sending email. This campaign can be seen and endorsed at dearaol.com. The opposition say it is nothing of the sort and it will only be of pure positive and virtuous use to its own members, citing reasons mainly to do with blocking spam.

The deal as the Poorhouse understands it is as follows. AOL currently filters the huge, huge number of emails its servers deal with for its subscribers in an effort to check for and remove spam. Because no automatic spam detection system can come anywhere near close to perfection sometimes spam slips through and sometimes email that is actually wanted gets removed. This will be familiar to pretty much every user of the big email brands such as Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL. What AOL proposes is adding another service...and of course charging for it.

The idea is that you as a reputable business, organisation or person will be able to pay AOL to be sure that it accepts your email and bypass the spam filters entirely. This hence "guarantees" (insomuch as anything guarantees AOL don't reject your email - the Poorhouse knows many people have unfairly suffered from false AOL rejection before) that it will be delivered to the AOL subscriber you emailed. Furthermore it will be delivered complete without external images and other fancy bits stripped out which is normally done for security reasons.

The arguments at dearaol are mostly against creating a two-tier level of service. Email has revolutionised and enhanced the ability of non-profit campaign groups like the founding members of the campaign to communicate and organise their grass-roots members. These days it is hard to imagine trying to coordinate some mass campaign with having to write out old-fashioned letters, pay the postage and wait 2 days for them to be delivered. Individuals are also no doubt quite happy to be able to send electronic communications to Auntie Mavis in Australia at light-speed for essentially no money (although it should be noted it almost always does cost something to access the infrastructure: Internet Service Provider costs for example). Many non-profit and adhoc groups would not be able to afford to pay extra per email to ensure its delivery, and hence this skews the email system to favour the big evil corporations who can afford to splash out on e-mail costs willy-nilly. Yet again, those with money win out. Furthermore, if AOL does financially well out of this, it is extremely easy to imagine the majority of other email providers joining a similar scheme.

Those who disagree say that there's no real argument. AOL will still deliver all email to the level it does now, it's just that people who want and are able to to go to the extra expense of paying extra per mail will get a more reliable service. There are no losers. Much comment (including that in the mass media has been made about how it will reduce spam. Eagle-eyed readers might realise that that claim doesn't make any sense based on the previous assertion that all emails will be delivered as normal anyway. The Poorhouse cannot understand why you will get any less spam emailed to you; it's just you will get extra emails on top of that from "legitimate" (whatever the definition of that is) organisations and people.

Surely this is enough to raise alarm bells? Someone somewhere will allow rich-enough people of their choice - not yours - to bypass the spam filters. Even if we could be sure only wonderful lovely friendly companies would ever be allowed to sign up to the scheme which sounds slightly improbably in itself, with the level of malicious hackery talent out there, how long will it be before a naughty spammer, phisher or black-hat hacker manages to subvert their way into the system? Whether by faking the location of their mailserver, or using an insecure server of a legit company, or however else it surely is only a matter of time.

DearAol furthermore makes the point that if they follow this scheme it becomes in the interest of AOL to let their "normal" free email service go downhill. Of course no-one suggests that this would ever happen (ha!) but one can see that if their free service starts mishandling email one way or another, it will be another reason for a big rich company to sign up to the special paid for service. It is certainly seems unlikely that AOL would reduce the benefits of this paid-for scheme by making nice juicy big investments in their existing antispam technology for the benefit of their lowly subscribers.

In the opinion of the Poorhouse, it must be said that the idea as presented is not really a "tax on email"; that is a misleading (but eye-catching) description of it, and some of the anti-AOL arguments are rather hyperbolic. It is far from the end of the world, and many of the virtuous organisations involved in the campaign against it are best off (and almost certainly are) spending their time saving the planet in the other ways they do best. However there is enough truth in it to warrant at least keeping an eye on developments. Furthermore there are potentially problematic issues in biasing mass communication yet further towards people with money over ethics. Couple that with the fact that it most likely will not have a beneficial effect on spam at all and the Poorhouse instinctively does not warm to these plans at all.

If the idea also seems like a bad one to you, there is an open letter to AOL to sign expressing concerns against their plans or more information on the issue and ideas for action at the main campaign site.