Since AOL announced last week that it would be charging large organisations a fee to guarantee that their bulk emails were delivered directly to AOL subscriber's inboxes and not to their junk email folder, there has been a big upset in the online community, and non-profit organisations such as Oxfam have been in uproar against the idea. A large group of users, from the AIDS Foundation of Chicago to American Rights at Work set up a website (
http://www.dearaol.com) to ask AOL not to bring in their charge for sending bulk emails to AOL subscribers.
The charge for this service is seen by many as a tax on internet communication. This 'tax' is quoted on the Dearaol.com site to be, "a slippery slope that will harm the internet itself".
To answer the calls of the unhappy non-commercial groups AOL has announced that it will not be applying charges to "not-for-profit groups", which meet AOL's anti-spam requirements.
...The next problem for AOL will be how they identify which groups are "not-for-profit groups".
