The company's original plan would have required all bulk e-mailers to pay a small fee — ranging from 1/4 cent to 1 cent per message — to route their e-mail directly to a user's mailbox without first passing through junk mail filters.

AOL, a unit of Time Warner Inc., said the system would reduce help reduce spam because only legitimate groups would be likely to pay the fee.

But on Monday, a consortium of nonprofit groups, including the AFL-CIO labor union and political group MoveOn.org Civic Action, blasted plans to charge for the service, claiming it would stifle communication from organizations that couldn't afford to pay.

On Friday, the DearAOL.com Coalition again criticized AOL's latest move, saying it would "create a two-tiered Internet with one standard of e-mail reliability for the big guy and an inferior standard for the little guy."

AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said the service offered to nonprofit groups would have the same reliability as the commercial service. AOL plans to contract with a third-party e-mail accreditation service within the next two months, he said.

Call it anything you want it changes the way the web functions and adds a hook that simply not necessary. It seems that putting a white-list and black-list feature to all AOL users is clearly a better approach. 

Also they clearly cannot tell a spoofed or forged header any better than anyone else. So there is no new black magic being applied here. We know this as we have signed up to AOL's list and can confirm the emails never transited our email servers. No problem we are keeping the server transcripts in case they are ever necessary in a court case. Yeah the headers would indicate they have. Yet the server logs tell the truth and are valid in any court. Offering a service which cannot give the truth about the true path a mail is transiting is nothing new.