| Small business killer The real problem is for small businesses who don't send spam or unsollicited mail, but who do need to reach their customers on AOL or Yahoo as part of normal business transactions. The spam tariff plan makes no distinction between one message per day and a million mails per day in blocking a sender. As it is now, one has to negotiate with AOL to be able to send mail to their customers if one is sending mail through something like a small business server directly from a DSL address. Now they're trying to tax that. It's not so much the charge per message that is the problem. It is the up front costs, yearly subscription, approval requirements, etc. For example, I know a small business that has been on the Internet for 10 years. Their DSL ISP recently decided not to run a smart host anymore, so they had to switch last month to sending mail directly from their fixed IP DSL connection. Under the Goodmail rules, they will have to wait until next year before they can be approved as a sender because the sending address has not been active for a year. Until then their mail will automatically be marked as "probable spam". You've got to love this sick twist on "free enterprise" |
