The SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) email protocol is fundamentally flawed because it was never designed to be secure in the first place and lacks any authentication of the source of an email.  Simply put, SMTP is based on the honor system, with no way to confirm the authenticity of the sender let alone track the sender.  What this means is that anyone can send email as any assumed identity from anywhere in the world.  I can say I'm the CEO of your company or I can say I'm the Pope when I send you an email and there is no way to confirm or deny it's legitimacy. 

The only way to level the playing field against spam is to upgrade the SMTP protocol beyond the honor system and make spoofing & Forging headers nearly impossible. We will call the new protocol as SMTP v2 and the existing SMTP protocol as SMTP v1.  Unlike some who are suggesting a new SMTP protocol all together which could never be implemented easily, SMTP v2 should be backward compatible to the existing protocol to facilitate a seamless migration. George Ou "Written 2003"

AOL, Yahoo and Goodmail again are the primary targets here! Since they offer no new way of determining spoofed or forged headers which is a fact they will have to admit. If you offer nothing new except charging money, how then have you realistically changed anything? The fact is without changing the protocol or adding something people would be willing to pay for, what is the point? Since they are charging the sender for an express lane for spam this does not seem like a valid approach to anti-spam.