It’s because their own spam filtering system is broken.
It doesn’t work and it costs money. Goodmail promised to turn it into a profit center.
Proof lies in how AOL itself treated a flood of e-mail about DearAOL.Com a site set up to protest the proposed Goodmail e-mail tax.
Apparently it banned all e-mail mentioning the site after a single complaint from someone on the double opt-in list supporting the anti-tax campaign.
Danny O’Brien, the activist coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, did the forensics on this and reported it back to Dave Farber’s Interesting-People list, after the EFF sent out a protest that called the move politically motivated and censorship.
Danny explains after the flip:
Many AOL users treat the AOL client’s "spam" button, rather sensibly as a
"I don’t want to receive any more of this mail". I suspect this person
was unsubscribing by hitting this button.Unfortunately, AOL’s
semantics are rather different: they take it as meaning "treat this mail
as suspect for everyone else". (This is one of the practical problems
of having intermediaries attempt to make decisions about end-user email
delivery without adequate feedback or transparency. Fixing this
semantic gap is one of the ongoing challenges of fighting spam: a
consistent standard for confirm and unsubscribes may well go some way to
fixing it.)Anyway, AOL clearly doesn’t view the mail as spam in a strong
sense, because they haven’t banned my email address or IP. What they
did, it appears, is check out the mentioned URL.Somehow – and
this is what AOL’s tech support folk told me when I called them
this
morning – they identified www.dearaol.com
as a "morpher". This is a site
that redirects user clicks to many
different sites.It’s true: www.dearaol.com has round-robin DNS. I plead
guilty to load-balancing of the most heinous kind.AOL appears to have
taken this as a sure-fire indication of a spamming site,
and instantly
banned *every email that mentions this URL* from entering the
AOL
system.That includes, incidentally, people mailing themselves the URL.
The list that Danny was mailing to was double opt-in. That is someone would subscribe, an e-mail would be sent to the subscribing address, and that e-mail had to be answered affirmatively, proving that the address in question wanted the e-mail.
This is not what happens with Goodmail. Danny, quoting from a Goodmail document (PDF), notes that "Goodmail’s acceptable use policy…permits single opt-in for
paying senders of CertifiedEmail."
I have said this before, and will say it again. E-mail lists should be double opt-in, and auditable. Period. Marketers don’t want to do this because it’s a hassle. They’d rather pay someone to make certain the e-mail goes through.
And that’s the problem.
Why don’t the big ISPs just use better antispam software? Better in the sense that they are smarter in how they use and collect end-user feedback. The system built into Thunderbird is pretty good, too bad it can’t talk directly to Comcast so that the filtering would happen at the server level and work when I use something other than Thunderbird to check my e-mail. This is increasingly an issue as I find myself now with multiple devices capable of doing e-mail but each running a different client.
Why don’t the big ISPs just use better antispam software? Better in the sense that they are smarter in how they use and collect end-user feedback. The system built into Thunderbird is pretty good, too bad it can’t talk directly to Comcast so that the filtering would happen at the server level and work when I use something other than Thunderbird to check my e-mail. This is increasingly an issue as I find myself now with multiple devices capable of doing e-mail but each running a different client.