• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, February 27, 2006

The civil liberties organization Electronic Frontier Foundation has assembled a disparate group of nonprofits and entrepreneurs--including Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, the Gun Owners of America, MoveOn.org Civil Action, and the Association of Cancer Online Resources--to fight America Online's plan to charge marketers for guaranteed e-mail delivery.

The EFF says it's afraid that any system that gives preference to paid e-mail senders will ultimately hinder the flow of information online. "AOL is selling something that they don't really own, which is access to their users' in-boxes," said Danny O'Brien, activism coordinator at the EFF. The group Tuesday will announce that it intends to protest AOL's new e-mail plan.

The AOL-Goodmail deal, announced at the beginning of the month, offers guaranteed delivery to marketers who pay a per-message fee. Yahoo also will soon implement a similar program using Goodmail; Microsoft already uses Bonded Sender, a program of Goodmail competitor Return Path, for anti-spam authentication.

The EFF and others say that this fee-based system won't stop spammers--and in fact, might make the spam problem even worse by removing the incentive for AOL and others to improve their spam filters. Currently, spam filters are imperfect, often excluding legitimate e-mail from in-boxes. The EFF argues that AOL will have little motive to stop these false-positives when, with the new deal, AOL can offer marketers the opportunity to bypass spam filters for a fee.

"When money enters the question, the incentives for AOL to accidentally drop mail--or, probably more practically, to not tend to their whitelist and other anti-spam measures--is very strong," said O'Brien.

AOL did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

People and companies that depend on e-mail also fear that they'll be at a competitive disadvantage if they don't pay the fee. At online classifieds site Craigslist, the company sends confirming e-mails to users that post messages; if those confirmations don't get through, the company could face problems, said Newmark. "We're doing community service. Should we be charged for that?" he asked. "If we work together, we can go after the bad guys, and not cause any collateral damage," he added.