Two of the world's biggest e-mail account providers, Yahoo Inc. and America Online, plan to introduce a service that would charge senders a fee to route their e-mail directly to a user's mailbox without first passing through junk mail filters, representatives of both companies said Sunday.

The fees, which would range from 1/4 cent to 1 cent per e-mail, are the latest attempts by the companies to weed out unsolicited ads, commonly called spam, and identity-theft scams. In exchange for paying, e-mail senders will be guaranteed their messages won't be filtered and will bear a seal alerting recipients they're legitimate.

Both companies have long filtered e-mail by searching for keywords commonly contained in spam and fraudulent e-mail. AOL also strips images and Web links from many messages to prevent the display of pornographic pictures and malicious Web addresses. Both practices sometimes falsely identify legitimate messages as junk mail, making life difficult for businesses that rely on e-mail.

"We were hearing not only from members but also e-mail partners that they wanted a different way of delivering e-mail that would stand out in the inbox and would guarantee them delivery," said spokesman Nicholas Graham, adding that AOL, a division of New York-based Time Warner Inc., will start offering the service in the next two months. Company spokeswoman Karen Mahon said Sunday Sunnyvale-based Yahoo will begin offering a similar service in the coming months.

This is too funny, let's get this straight... You want to charge people to not do anything to their mail which has proven unreliable due to your filters which do more harm than good???? If you had built a proper mail system, as we have been stating for months and put this control in the hands of your users none of this would matter. What is so complex about putting the white-listing in the hands of your users where it belongs.

If you developed this software in house the team should be fired. If you paid an outsourcing company to do it, you should get refund. People talk bad about MS when they make a mistake of any kind. Now AOL and Yahoo can dictate whatever foolish policy they want and people say nothing. Where are the M$ Zealots when there is something like this happening right out in the open?

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