What can the folks at tech site Slashdot.org possibly be reading—or not reading—to make a recent article headlined “Pay-per-E-mail and the ‘Market Myth,’” worthy of the heading “from the if-you-only-read-one-article-today dept.”?
The piece attempted to debunk the idea that market forces will punish AOL if the ISP handles e-mail too carelessly from non-paying senders as a result of implementing Goodmail’s Certified E-mail program.
However, the article’s logic is so flawed, it has us questioning the Slashdot staff’s ability to reason.
In the piece, Bennett Haselton of Peacefire.org wrote that Hotmail had a perfectly fine whitelisting program until it began using Bonded Sender.
The whole piece is here: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/29/1411221&from=rss
But the following, we believe, is enough of an excerpt to get the point:
“At one time, if your newsletter was being wrongly blocked by Hotmail, you could fill out a questionnaire with some verification information, and they would add you to the whitelist,” wrote Haselton “However, once Hotmail started using Bonded Sender, a third-party company that requires you to post a $2,000 bond in order to get on their whitelist, Hotmail revoked the free whitelistings,” he continued.
“If your newsletter is being blocked by Hotmail’s filters, no matter how many people vouch for you as a non-spammer, the only way to make sure you get past the filters is to pay the $2,000 to Bonded Sender. (I refused to pay the fee, and of the last seven messages that I sent to our press list, all of them got labeled by Hotmail as “Junk Mail”.)
“The problem is that many advocates of these systems say that any flaws will get sorted out automatically by ‘the market’ -- and in this case I think that is simply wrong,” Haselton wrote.
“Have people left in droves because non-Bonded-Sender e-mail gets blocked? No, because if they never see it getting blocked they don't know what happens. Free markets only solve problems that are actually visible to the user.”
First, we don’t know that Hotmail is overzealous in its spam filtering. All we know is that Haselton claims his e-mail is getting improperly diverted into junk folders in some e-mail boxes he monitors.
Also, Hotmail is free. If its users haven’t left “in droves” it’s because they think they’re getting reasonable service for what they give in return. If Hotmail began charging, the equation would change dramatically.
Moreover, we can’t possibly know if Hotmail users abandon the service. If subscribers aren’t satisfied with their free service at Hotmail, they’ll simply set up another account elsewhere—without bothering to shut down their Hotmail account; after all, they’re not being billed for it—and have e-mail they care about sent to a paid or work account that they consider more reliable.
And whatever one thinks of class-action lawsuits, the recently proposed Verizon settlement is at least anecdotal evidence that people will howl if their e-mail gets blocked in a paid account. Seven people accused Verizon of wrongly blocking their e-mail.
Verizon has proposed small refunds for those affected, $1,000 each for the seven class representatives, and $1.4 million for the lawyers involved.
Verizon also has agreed to change the way it filters spam.
Also, if e-mail recipients aren’t aware some messages are being blocked, it’s because whatever the sender of those messages has had to say since the recipient agreed to the relationship has apparently been of little or no value.
It is up to Haselton to ensure his subscribers will miss his communications if they begin failing to show up.
An e-mail here and there can certainly get dropped without being missed. But if people don’t know e-mail they said they want to receive is routinely being blocked, it indicates something about how the sender has handled that relationship, now, doesn’t it?
