McKenna takes on AOL and Yahoo email debacle

Do you Yahoo? Maybe not so much anymore. Or maybe you’re one of AOL’s two million members who are scratching their heads wondering why some email is no longer being delivered. Or perhaps you’re just one of the millions of us that use a mailing list to communicate with a large number of people—and some of those people happen to have an AOL or Yahoo email address. Well, guess what, folks, these two corporations have decided what you want doesn’t matter. They want less spam, and they’re willing to tick you off to get it.

This little Band of Two—little as in the sense of there are only two of them—for now—have said that if you’re sending an email from your AOL or Yahoo email account, you must use one of their servers. This means you can’t use a third-party mailing service such as ConstantContact or Mailchimp to send emails. You also can’t receive emails sent by any third-party email service. Ignore their rule and your mail won’t go through. Not only will it not be delivered to other users who have their email address with the Band of Two, but any other completely independent services that comply with industry email standards—think Gmail with its 500 million users—will also reject your email because of the policy implemented by AOL and Yahoo.

When corporations make a change that will affect nearly 300 million customers, that’s a significant decision. Personally, I might expect said corporations to notify said customers in a timely fashion with a revision to said corporation’s Terms of Service in carefully worded legalese guaranteed to quash any questions, lawsuits, or other resistance from the rabble they call “valued customer.” I might not be so snarky had either of these giants made any such attempt, but they kept it a secret until someone flipped a switch and let the chaos roll downhill. It all just seems so 1984.

If you have an AOL or Yahoo email address, you have two options, and they both might seem pretty ugly. First, you can just stop signing up to receive newsletters, blog posts, or other email that might come through a third party. Not exactly customer-friendly, right? Your other option is even less friendly: change your email address. For now, you could use Gmail because they haven’t jumped on the band wagon. In the future, who knows? Your safest option is to buy your own domain name and set up an email account to run off of that domain. I told you—both pretty ugly.

What do you think of this change? Do you have an AOL or Yahoo email account? Does this decision go too far? Or, is it a necessary step in the war on spam?