An e-mail tax to publish, or "You've got [paid] mail!"

America Online, gateway and de-facto publisher for so many people who go online, will now be taking money to pass its members their mail. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is up in arms over the AOL plan to let bulk mailers pay to have their messages delivered straight to a preferred in-box of an AOL customer.

Once a pay-to-speak system like this gets going, it will be increasingly difficult for people who don't pay to get their mail through. The system has no way to distinguish between ordinary mail and bulk mail, spam and non-spam, personal and commercial mail. It just gives preference to people who pay.

Non-profits like The Association for Cancer Online Resources are steamed about this, too, because they publish their messages by way of e-mail. Heck, a lot of us do, trying to build a practice or get notice for our publications. The belief now is that un-paid e-mails to AOL customers are going to get rough treatment, like a streetwalker pretending that what you're about to embark on is "a date." Unpaid messages are mail, alright. Just not the kind you'd take home to meet mom.

MoveOn.org is mounting an e-mail campaign (some irony there) to make AOL change its mind. It's referencing reports in The New York Times (which in another bit of irony, was among the publishers testing the GoodMail service that will make the AOL scheme possible) and from L-Soft, which makes the Listserv software that drives so many public interest newsgroups.