By: Michael E. Martinez

Both AOL and Yahoo! have announced they will start charging fees for some of their customers. The plan is designed to fight off spam and email scams. The charges are designed to ensure that the sender of particular emails are legitimate, but for now the services only targets businesses that sends large bulks of email. The fees will range from 1/4th to a cent per email and will be an optional service rather than mandatory.

I think it was only a matter of time that this "email postage" would occur. This does have the potential to make a lot of money on the internet service provider's part. Although this is only for businesses, I have a strong feeling that these charges will untilmately come down to consumers. However, these charges will not happen overnight. It will take awhile for the ISP's to charge consumers since they want to use this as a tool to fight spam.

There is no doubt in my mind that this will cause controversy on Capital Hill as well as with businesses. Since the recent rise of the postage stamp to 39 cents, its only natural for more people to revert to emails because they are known for being "free". It looks like the Feds are catching up with email faster than we all thought.

Email postage has been talked about for a long time, so has spam. Studies show over 60 percent of all emails are spam. Hopefully this method of charging for emails will help to slowdown the rate of spam. There will be loopholes in the email postage like all technology, so I can tell you that it won't get rid of all spam much like the Do Not Call List won't get rid of all telemarketers.