E-mail is changing, how exciting!

Aside from the “actual” media’s coverage,[Image removed] there’s been a lot of noise recently about AOL’s decision to adopt the Goodmail system of pay-per-email spam protection.

It’s clear now, although it wasn’t at first, that AOL is keeping the “whitelist” program they have been running so far.

In my mind, the two big opinions to catch are from Fred Wilson, who thinks that pay-per-email is the wrong way to go about protecting inboxes, and Jason Calacanis, who defends AOL’s new e-mail strategy.

[ Edit: Also read Tom Evslin’s It’s my mailbox; pay me post, coming in against the AOL “more revenue” method. ]

There are plenty of people who are taking this opportunity to point out how RSS can replace e-mail, but I think that as things currently stand they are mostly wrong. RSS can eventually replace mass-mailings, yes, but this is about now and e-mail.*

If you want the full accounts, you should read both posts I linked to above, but the bottom line is that there are two basic approahces being developed for inbox protection - make mailers pay for each e-mail, which will hopefully put spammers out of business, or track mailer reputation and charge e-mailers flat fees to be in part of a “good reputation, guaranteed delivery” program.

Neither method really cuts it, but if I had to pick one, i’d pick pay-per-email. This is because it’s largely analogous to physical mail, which already seems to work to a certain extent, and what you pay for is “delivery for sure,” that is, it’s like paying for FedEx over USPS. You pay a bit more to make sure it gets there. Mailer’s can always just send e-mail and let it brave the standard filters on its own merit.
But this method leaves out reputation, and that is not good. As an e-mail user, I would rather have my e-mail carrier do their best to filter out companies who send nothing but bullshit spam, rather than simply charging them for access to my inbox.** Where is my benefit there?

This is a difficult problem to solve, and I’m glad that AOL is leading the charge in trying to fix it, but I don’t think anybody has got it quite right yet. If it’s e-mail I want to have, from a well-behaved sender (what about Feedblitz emails? What about small e-newsletters like Flicker?) I don’t think they should be charged to get me content I want to have.

I’m not sure what the answer is. Maybe we need a system where senders who aren’t on the good list have to pay penalties everytime they get a complaint. The more complaints they get, the more it costs them to get to my inbox?

Either way, we’re not quite there yet. But I am interested to see how it changes the way we use e-mail.

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* This is wrong because e-mail is, as Fred puts it, “braindead simple” in ways that RSS currently is not. RSS is also not perfectly suited for all e-mail lists. Actual E-zines are better presented in a concrete e-mail instead of a segmented rss feed. E-mail is in the inbox, RSS has to be remembered and looked for. There’s a reason many people have feedblitz (or other e-mail services’) boxes on their blogs - RSS and e-mail are two different and distinct mediums.

** It’s kind of odd that this is such an annoying concept, since “charge them for access to my inbox” is the basic philosophy by which we have free webmail right now. I use Yahoo! e-mail space and bandwidth for free in exchange for them selling ad-space in my inbox. That’s the same, no?