New email charges 'only for businesses'

An AOL plan to charge for email will not affect ordinary users - except that they may notice a drop in the amount of spam mail they receive, according to a company spokesman.

AOL and Yahoo have signed up to a system run by a company called Goodmail, which authenticates the source of an email.

It is targeted at companies who want to ensure that legitimate promotional material gets past spam filters, and prevent spoofers and phishers from using their names to hoodwink customers.

The charge of between 0.25 and one US cent (0.15p to 0.5p approx) per email would be paid by the sender and not the user, an AOL spokesman said.

He believed AOL would take a proportion of the revenue but he did not know how much.

The system does not, as one newspaper reported, mean paid-for email gets delivered more quickly.

'The mail bypasses spam filters so there may be a nanosecond in it, but not anything that you would notice,' the spokesman said.

AOL also has a free White List system by which smaller firms can get trusted status by conforming to a set of rules, such as allowing their domain-name server to confirm the source of an email.

One technique used by phishers is to try to trick people into revealing details of their accounts by sending email purporting to come from their bank or a trusted company.

Email charges have often been suggested as a way to defeat spam because they would make the cost of mass mailouts prohibitive.

AOL says the Goodmail system will be available only to US and Canadian companies in the first instance, though the authentication will benefit of their customers will be in Europe and elsewhere. It will go liove in the second quarter of this year.