AOL and Yahoo are not charging for email. What they are doing (and don’t be surprised if other ISPs follow suit) is putting in place a premium service to guarantee that your email goes through. That is what you will pay for.

The new service is kind of like a “first class” upgrade for email. If you’ve paid for the service, that means that this “Goodmail” service has already vouched that you are not a spammer and that your email has been sent legitimately and it will be sent to its recipient quickly and with absolutely no chance that it will land in an AOL or Yahoo users’ junk file (unless the person individually has put it there).

If you don’t pay for the premium service, your email will be evaluated just as it was before and it may or may not be considered spam, just as it currently is.

The idea is that most people won’t bother with the premium service and their mail will go through as always. The spammers, those that send a million messages, won’t pay the fee and their email will get caught by the filters just as they already do (or already supposed to).

The legitimate emailers who send out a lot of email will have to pay to make sure that their mail doesn’t end up getting swept up with the junk. This is fine for the New York Times and the American Red Cross and other companies with deep pockets that can afford this hit. Nonprofit organizations are going to suffer the most because we rely on our email newsletters for our communications and even 1/4 a cent adds up quickly. So we either have to pay this new fee, or take our chances as we always have.

My fear is that once this service is in place, AOL and Yahoo will turn up the sensitivity on their filters so the only way we can get our mail through is to pay.