Well, that’s what AOL and Yahoo are hoping you’ll do. Postage on email has been something that’s been talked about for years. I remember rumors about this back when I worked at a local ISP about 6 years ago. I guess it has finally come to light and someone’s taking the first real step in implementing this now. The system would allow a user to pay 1/4 to 1 cent postage on their email to ensure that it will reach the recipient.

In AOL’s case, if the sender pays postage on their email it is guaranteed to be in your mailbox. It skips all spam checks and gets marked as “AOL Certified E-Mail.” Everything else will have to make its way thru the jungle of filters as they do now. Yahoo has yet to have figured out how their system will function but I can only imagine that it would basically be the same.

Now, call me crazy but the reason that AOL and Yahoo are doing this in the first place is to prevent junk mail, and phishing scams. But what makes them think that spammers won’t just pay to send their spam? Does this not just provide an even MORE direct route to you? Spamming must be working for them or else it just wouldn’t happen. What’s a little added cost? I can see that this will force a few spammers to stop sending to random email addresses but even that I think is a small price to pay… Business expense? haha.

Anyways, it will be interesting to see how this all plays out. Who knows, it might just become the norm and it might just actually work. We’ll find out soon enough…