[Coco] [off topic] AOL email charges

[Kenneth Schunk]

You know guys, it's easy to believe the worst in actions from AOL, but in
this case you've pretty much got it wrong.

What AOL is doing is replacing their internal Whitelist system with a new
charge per e-mail system. This will affect larger (well, largish) volume
senders, not the average AOL user. If you're not on the Whitelist, or soon
aren't in their pay to play system, your e-mail's will still get through. If
you're a mailing list (like this one) they might end up in the user's spam
folder, and any embedded links or images won't be displayed. If you pay, and
play nice by their other rules, your bulk sent e-mail will zoom on through
to Grandma's mail box. Normal e-mail, like the one's I get from my inlaws or
parents, won't see a single change from this. Anyone on this list that is
getting it sent to their AOL account might see it show up without embedded
links.

It won't cut AOL users off from the internet, and it probably won't do much
to stop spam, but it's not the "everyone has to pay to send e-mail to AOL"
thing that I keep reading about.

I know that we are all uber-computer geeks here, proud of running a Linux
kinda system when Mr. Torvalds himself was making pretty pictures with
crayons, but AOL isn't that bad for some people. It took me MONTHS to get my
mother-inlaw to the point that she could use AOL for the basics, and I
despair of trying to change her e-mail address now. You have to remember - I
could change her address easy enough, but EVERYONE else on her mailing list
is just as computer capable, and I sure can't go to all of their houses to
fix the changed e-mail on their end.