Pay to Play E-mail

News comes today that AOL and Yahoo! will charge e-mail marketers to ensure that their messages get to people who want to receive them. You can read the story from EarthWebNews and then ask yourself: Why would anyone work to clean up spam if they could leverage it to make money?

At its core, what we're doing is all about safety and security of our members and doing everything that we can to help maintain the trust in and the integrity of the e-mail system of the Web, which has been constantly under attack from Internet miscreants like scammers, phishers and spammers," Graham told internetnews.com.

All about safety and security? Sure about that? This reminded me of something. A few years back there was an e-mail that started in Canada and then showed up in the United States about the post office putting a surcharge on e-mail. The thought was that the adoption of e-mail was hurting business at the post office, and they wanted to cash in. The message was so widespread that the U.S. Postal Service actually issued a press release denying the rumor.