AOL and Yahoo pay to play...

AOL and Yahoo pay to play makes cents

I am the CEO of Inetekk.com, Inc. I run a large subscription system called Veretekk. We have over 25,000 subscribers and for years we have recommended that our subscribers use Yahoo as a forwarding email account for their incoming email verifications, and correspondence. We did this instead of offering everyone POP or web accounts for ease and economy.Until four months ago every one of our subscribers were receiving all their email within seconds. Then the customer support issues started to spike around October 2005. Our subscribers were upset. They claimed our system wasn't sending email to their accounts, or our email was arriving in hours instead of seconds. Or the next day. Or not at all. It was sporadic and it made us look like our email system was unreliable.I called Yahoo to ask if they had blacklisted our servers. They said no, there is not an issue. I started thinking we had server issues. So I started testing everyone’s account with my own separate mail server called wavefour.com.I have been on the Internet since the first days all the way back to 1991. Our Inetekk system for Veretekk has hundreds of servers located in San Jose, CA. My wavefour mail server is hosted with communitech in Florida and has no filters on it what so ever. Every time I would set up a special testing wavefour pop account for one of my subscribers, they would call back and say, wow, I am now getting all my email in less than a second.The complaints from our subscribers was escalating. Curiously we started getting the same complaints from our AOL subscribers. All of a sudden they had the same issues with mail delivery. I started handing out wavefour pop accounts like crazy and got the same response. Wow, I am now getting all my email within seconds. So I called AOL and they said the same thing we weren't blocked.About a month ago I heard that Yahoo and AOL had started using gray listing. This is something real small ISPs use, but the big guys don't. All my colleges were wondering hwat in the world would big mail services like Yahoo would be doing that for.Gray listing blocks or defers ISPs that are detected sending large volumes of email. And we definitely fit that category.Well.....we all now know why these two obnoxious giants were doing this for the last four months. The did this to raise support issues with our clients in hopes of raising our frustration levels to a point were we would just roll over and pay Yahoo and AOL for the privilege of sending email to our clients using their services.Think again AOL and Yahoo. Our clients are dropping their accounts with you left and right. Soon someone is going to offer real email pop accounts for free. I say it is about time. AOL and Yahoo are symptomatic of large monopolistic disconnected greedy corporations that have forgotten that it is the customer that pays their bills.

Thomas Prendergast CEO, inetekk Inc.

For more information on Veretekk, please visit me at: http://jskelton.veretekk.com