Are Aol And Yahoo Rabid Extortionists Or Just Plain Stupid?

Today I met a client for lunch He runs a ticketing agency in
Vienna and complained about confirmation emails not getting
through to customers with an AOL or Yahoo email account
In an article he recently stumbled upon, it refers to: “AOL and
Yahoo are planning to begin charging what amounts to postage for
those sending multiple email messages to their subscribers”
Although they’re positioning it as an anti-spam measure, it will
have the effect of hampering the distribution of free
information by small and non-profit publishers
It goes on to say: “It’s not only mass emailings that would be
affected by the system Order confirmationsthat send large
amounts of email would be treated as trash under the new system
unless the fee was paid”
They use the future tense, whereas my client says that customers
are now either complaining about not getting confirmation
messages or turning up in Vienna without knowing where to
collect them from, thus making his business look inefficient
Another client recently complained that emails to partners in
his weekly lottery are never received now if the email is sent
from his commercial account to AOL
It would be polite, if nothing else, if these two corporations
would at least inform businesses about their dodgy business
tactics which are already in operation
What this means is that the quasi-rich guy can send a free email
to another quasi-rich guy, but if he wants to communicate with a
quasi-poor guy, he has to pay for it Logical!
My client said that if he posted a letter he would have to pay
the post office for its services and hence he didn’t mind paying
a fraction of that online But snail mail doesn’t have corporate
advertising on it for one thing and at least he is asked to pay
for the stamp, rather than the mail not being sent, which is
what is happening with AOL in particluar
Many publishers and organisations that send large amounts of
legitimate email might now urge their readers to switch to
Google or Microsoft email or other services that don’t levy a
fee on senders Or we can all set up AOL and Yahoo accounts and
send commercial mail from those accounts
This is possibly one of the most stupid online business plans
that has ever been ill-thought-out Does this means that, for
example, a ticketing agency will have to scan their database and
inform AOL and Yahoo that they plan to send a confirmation
letter to a customer, micro-pay a quarter of a cent to both,
before they do the mail-out?

Tags | account, confirmation, corporate, corporations, future, lottery, means, office, publishers, result, snail, tactics, tense, vienna