Re: [PLUG] Fwd: [Sc-Ir] FW: The AOL - Good Mail TAX !!!

[Toby DiPasquale <toby@cbcg.net>]

On Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 06:48:01PM -0500, Jeff Abrahamson wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 05:18:38PM -0500, William H. Magill wrote:
> > Anyone know where this is being discussed? (Or any other details  
> > about it?)

Its being discussed quite vociferously by the major players in SMTP and
anti-spam.

> > The Press Release from L-soft is here:
> > 
> >         http://www.lsoft.com/news/aol-goodmail.asp
> 
> Schemes like this also help AOL avoid the productive work of providing
> their customers with an MUA that has the features needed to avoid user
> annoyance with spam (like filters, fast delete operations, threading,
> and so forth).

This is just so far off base I can't stand it. If it sounds like I'm
coming down hard on you, I am, but only because I think this list's
readers deserve to know better.

When you're AOL, you have customer bases in the 8 figure range. Adding MUA
features does two things:

1. Increases your support center calls as people get used to the new
feature.

2. Nothing to solve the spam problem on the whole.

What if they gave their customers access to full headers and threading?
Answer: they'd be confused. AOL's customers are AOL's customers for a
reason. They are not the most technically-savvy bunch of email users. As
such, AOL has decided that outsourcing email reputation makes sense for
them, since it was doing nothing but raising their support costs and IT
costs and Goodmail is more qualified to do it for them, since that is
their raison d'etre.

Hotmail has full headers. I might have been the only person in North
America every to turn this feature on, and I turned it off shortly because
it was so poorly integrated with the rest of the layout. And I _wanted_
it.

The most common complaint I hear about GMail from non-techies is "why
can't they make it so you can turn those 'conversation' things off?" Get
this now: regular mail users can't follow threading. If it somehow gets
turned on in their MUA, they call their geeky nephew to get him to turn it
off. Some of those "non-techies" include mail admistrators at major
universities in Philadelphia, by the way.

Oh, and as for filters, they have them. LOTS and LOTS of them. And if
you're thinking Bayesian, think again. Grab a napkin and see if you can
calculate the cost in disk and support for maintaining roughly 40+ million
token corpuses. 

AOL Mail Admin: "Yeah, we want to add another 500 nodes to the mail
cluster to support Bayesian spam filtering."

CFO: "What?? How many customers will that get us?"

AOL Mail Admin: "Um..."

CFO: "Well how many more messages can we store on those nodes?"

AOL Mail Admin: "None. Its just for the corpuses."

CFO: "Get the hell out of my office."

True, they could push some filtering towards the end user, but most of
them wouldn't use it anyway, and they clearly have their efforts focused
on this Safety and Security Center because _that_'s what their customers
are currently complaining about.

As for Goodmail, yes the system is proprietary, yes its not open source
and yes it costs money. But it won't cost anybody on this list a dime to
send to AOL since you're not a bulk mailer that wants to get their mail
through so badly that they are willing to pay Goodmail for the privilege.
The Goodmail system is being used as a whitelist, same as the old one.
Nothing more. No mail is going to be rejected b/c it doesn't have a
Goodmail seal on it.

If you send AOL more than 10,000 messages per day, then you should be
worried about this announcement. If not, its a non-issue. Cut down on the
/., huh fellas?

P.S. AOL doesn't garner any more customers by upgrading their MUA.
Its a commodity, and even more so since they don't have the press hanging
on their every more like GOOG does. From a purely capitalistic viewpoint,
upgrading a service that won't get you more customers makes no sense.
You're not even likely to see significant upgrades to GMail in the future,
except to integrate with their other new services.

-- 
Toby DiPasquale
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