Leader: The mixed blessing of paid-for email

AOL has confirmed it will be offering a service which enables paid-for email to pass through its spam filters. The 'word on the street' is that Yahoo! is also going to be launching a similar service.

The idea is that if reputable companies are charged, even a nominal fee, to ensure delivery then they may well sign up, while spammers sending millions of emails per day aren't going to want to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege.

In effect it will create a two-tier system - comparable in many ways to the first and second class mail system in place with 'snail mail'.

Users will receive all paid-for mail, which won't be filtered in any way and will be stamped to confirm it has come from a sender registered with the third party Goodmail system, which authenticates the sender and forces them to meet key criteria.

It's all well and good but what will this really mean? There are a number of possible scenarios.

The creation of a two-tier email system could mean that companies feel forced to use the paid-for system for fear their emails will be subject to second class treatment. This may become the case if enough companies sign up. If it's only a handful that participate then users will continue to check other folders, and perhaps even their spam traps, for emails they are expecting.

Buying the right to email somebody, after all, doesn't mean they want to receive it. Among the planned early adopters is believed to be at least one large charity and while their emails are very unlikely to be spam, it remains unlikely that many users ever check their accounts to see if the latest update or fundraising request has arrived.

Some cynics have suggested AOL and Yahoo! might even ramp up the filtering of free email. Why? More false positives - one reason this scheme has been proposed in the first place - would certainly encourage companies hoping to reach webmail users to sign up and grow the paid-for revenues. An AOL spokesman, however, flatly denied this would be the case.

Which means of course that spammers will continue to target email accounts in the same way they currently do. Seeing what is able to 'float to the top' doesn't mean users will be any less plagued by the rest of the deluge.

It goes without saying that spammers will also inevitably try to break into this elite channel of email. AOL is confident they won't be able to, though the spokesman does accept it makes for a tempting target.

Spoofing of stamped, authorised emails is also likely to become de rigueur in a climate where users may be confused about whether or not they are covered by such a system.

And of course in a time when spam attacks are actually getting far more targeted, many cyber criminals will be studying the Goodmail criteria pretty closely to work out if there is any way they can become a paying customer. After all, one 'fast-tracked' and stamped email may only cost them a dollar to send to 100 recipients but could cost the individuals receiving them a great deal more.

Then there are concerns about the democracy of the internet. To look at the offering from another perspective, companies and organisations with the financial clout and the ability to do take part in the scheme are effectively paying to downgrade by default other senders' legitimate email.

At the current time with just two service providers on-board and the problems above providing very real concerns, we might most kindly file this under 'interesting idea' but probably too little too late and inevitably, we suspect, too ineffective.