Big two stamp a charge on email
By Saul Hansell, New York
February 7, 2006

COMPANIES will soon have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp if they want to be certain their emails are delivered.

America Online and Yahoo!, two of the largest email account providers, are about to start using a system that gives preference to messages from companies that pay up to US1¢ each to have them delivered. The senders must promise to contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages or risk being blocked.

The internet companies say this will help them identify legitimate mail and reduce junk email, identity-theft scams and other scourges that plague users. They also will earn millions of dollars a year if the system is widely adopted.

AOL and Yahoo! will still accept email from senders who have not paid, but the paid messages will be given special treatment. On AOL, for example, they will go straight to users' main mailboxes and will not have to pass the gauntlet of spam filters.

Yahoo! and AOL say the new system is a way to restore some order to email. Spam and worries about online scams have made email an increasingly unreliable way for companies to reach customers, even as online transactions are becoming a crucial part of their businesses.

"The last time I checked, the postal service has a very similar system to provide different options," Nicholas Graham, an AOL spokesman, said. He pointed to services like certified mail, "where you really do get assurance that if what you send is important to you, it will be delivered, and delivered in a way that is different from other mail".

But critics say the two companies risk alienating their users and the companies that send email. The system will apply to mass mailings and individual commercial messages such as order confirmations from online stores and customised low-fare notices from airlines.

"AOL users will become dissatisfied when they don't receive the email that they want, and when they complain to the senders, they'll be told, 'it's AOL's fault'," Richi Jennings, an analyst at Ferris Research, which specialises in email, said.

As for companies that send email, "some will pay, but others will object to being held to ransom", he said. "A big danger is that one of them will be big enough to encourage AOL users to use a different email service."

In a broader sense, the move to create what is essentially a preferred class of email is a major change in the economics of the internet.

Until now, senders and recipients of email, and web pages and other information, each covered their own costs of using the network, with no money changing hands.

NEW YORK TIMES