Expect more spam from AOL, Yahoo e-mail plan

Yahoo and AOL have announced a plan to charge senders of e-mail to bypass the companies' junk mail filters. The charge would range from one-fourth to one cent per message.

How will this affect the average e-mail user? You should expect to see more unsolicited commercial e-mail if you use an AOL or Yahoo e-mail address.

Why?

Let's look at the economics. Would you spend a buck to send 100 e-mail messages to AOL or Yahoo users if your messages were already getting to them just fine? Of course not. So who would spend the money? Senders whose messages are getting stopped by the companies' filters.

Now, most mom-and-pop spammers, the folks responsible for the bulk of the sex-pill and mortgage pitches littering in-boxes, won't have the budget to ante up. But big companies will. An AOL representative told the AP that the New York Times Co. and credit report company Experian already have signed up.

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