Companies will soon have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp if they want to be certain that their e-mail will be delivered to many of their customers.

America Online and Yahoo, two of the world's largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered. The senders must promise to contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages, or risk being blocked entirely.

The Internet companies say that this will help them identify legitimate mail and cut down on junk e-mail, identity-theft scams and other scourges that plague users of their services. Thy also stand to earn millions of dollars a year from the system if it is widely adopted.

AOL and Yahoo will still accept e-mail from senders who have not paid, but the paid messages will be given special treatment. On AOL, for example, they will go straight to users' main mailboxes, and will not have to pass the gantlet of spam filters that could divert them to a junk-mail folder or strip them of images and Web links. As is the case now, mail arriving from addresses that users have added to their AOL address books will not be treated as spam.

Yahoo and AOL say the new system is a way to restore some order to e-mail, which, because of spam and worries about online scams, has become an increasingly unreliable way for companies to reach their customers, even as online transactions are becoming a crucial part of their businesses.

"The last time I checked, the postal service has a very similar system to provide different options," said Nicholas Graham, an AOL spokesman. He pointed to services like certified mail, "where you really do get assurance that if what you send is important to you, it will be delivered, and delivered in a way that is different from other mail."

But critics of the plan say that the two companies risk alienating both their users and the companies that send e-mail. The system will apply not only to mass mailings but also to individual commercial messages like order confirmations from online stores and customized low-fare notices from airlines.

"AOL users will become dissatisfied when they don't receive the e-mail that they want, and when they complain to the senders, they'll be told, 'it's AOL's fault,' " said Richi Jennings, an analyst at Ferris Research, which specializes in e-mail.

I'm as concerned about the problem of spam as the next person. I've long argued that spam filters such as AOL features only appear to solve the problem, as messages still clog up the transmission system even if they're not delivered to users' mailboxes. Something needs to be done, but I don't think the AOL/Goodmail solution is the answer -- all it does is create a new class of paid-for spam.

Right now, despite the drag on the system that filtered spam does nothing to help, at least I'm not bugged with a lot of unwanted commercial e-mails, and the few that get through can be quickly dealt with, marked as spam and deleted, with the hope that the system will start filtering them in the future. With this new system, however, I'll have no choice about the mail that comes from businesses that have paid for guaranteed delivery. I can delete them until I'm blue in the face, but I won't be able to tell the system that I don't want to receive mail from that vendor, because the vendor's money has trumped my preferences. And I doubt AOL will allow me to opt out of the Goodmail (I almost wrote "Greenmail" there -- it's the same idea), unless they start offering a fee-based premium service.

Of course, one thing we can do about this is to spread the word and hope there's a user rebellion among AOL and Yahoo subscribers.

[NY Times]