• by Bill McCloskey , March 1, 2006

A few weeks ago in this column I predicted that we would soon see gauntlets thrown down in response to the AOL/Goodmail announcement of its certified e-mail program. In case you have been living under a rock, certified e-mail is an e-mail stamp program that would guarantee delivery to the AOL inbox for those who are certified to receive a stamp and are willing to pay the fee (about a quarter cent per e-mail).

This week the gloves started flying as both the Electronic Frontier Foundation and political action group Move.org launched PR salvos against the plan. Calling the plan a tax on e-mail, Move.org sent a letter to its membership urging them to sign the following petition: ""AOL, don't auction off access to my inbox to giant corporations, while leaving my friends, family, and favorite causes wondering if their e-mails to me are being delivered at all. The right way to deal with spam is to put more control in the hands of users and to keep e-mail free."

The EEF worries that once a financial incentive is in place, current AOL spam filtering technology will go by the wayside, and that legitimate e-mail will be blocked unless it contains the stamp.

Both of these organizations, of course, have reason to worry. Many of their members use AOL as their e-mail service provider and costs for political action groups such as Move.org could be costly (thousands of dollars per mailing), if they decided to go the certification route.

Even the Urban Legend site Snopes (http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/e-mailtax.asp) got into the act, claiming that the notion that e-mail was being taxed to be a misrepresentation of the facts: "Referring to the proposed system as one which will implement an "e-mail tax" is inaccurate and misleading. No one is proposing that end users  ordinary AOL and Yahoo subscribers  be charged for sending or receiving e-mail. AOL and Yahoo are proposing to assess a cost-of-business surcharge to companies who want to ensure their commercial messages reach the inboxes of AOL and Yahoo subscribers instead of being diverted to trash folders by filters already in place to trap unsolicited commercial e-mail (better known as "spam")."

Others have been a little more in-your-face with their reactions to the Move.org and EEF statements and petitions:

"To be sarcastic about it: 20,000 signed the petition, while 2,980,000 told MoveOn to stop spamming them."--Seth Breidbart, Ph.D., creator of the Breidbart Index to measure spam.

"I think MoveOn has been very unreasonable, and now there's such a siege mentality vis-a-vis e-mail issues that they don't seem interested in listening."--Ray Everett-Church, counsel for CAUCE, an anti-spam advocacy group

The "EFF posting is not a balanced story, it is a hatchet job. The EFF's done a lot of good things. But they're simply way wrong in their single point agenda, 'spam filtering is bad and is a restriction on free speech'--especially when their two favorite examples of this restriction are a chronically open relay that keeps getting abused, and a political action site with poorly managed mailing lists."--Suresh Ramasubramanian, Manager of antispam operations at Outblaze, Coordinator, CAUCE Asia Pacific

"MoveOn has a history of sending spam. They have a history of mailing people who never asked for their mail and of not stopping when asked, and I expect that would not meet with Goodmail's standards."--Bill Cole, anti-spam expert.

The lines are drawn. As Pete Seeger would say: Which side are you on?