Most spam is generated by bot-nets, so the spammers are not going to pay anything. Meanwhile companies who do behave themselves anyway are either going to pay for email and then pass the cost on to their customers, or give up on the concept.

We do not get email from banks, they nag us to read messages when we log in. Any email from a bank would be assumed fake at this end, and they know this, so why should they pay anything?

We do get email we want from charities who could not afford to pay a premium.

I see this as being the thin edge of a wedge eventually leading to making people pay to send emails. As such I feel this is, on balance, a bad thing.

Our testing will be focused on “transactional” email messages such as bank statements and receipts, as stated in this
http://www.goodmailsystems.com/news/pressrelease102605.php
release. Since these messages are most often the target of phishing scams, we believe that highlighting the real ones will provide users additional phishing protection.

Our delivery policies for non “certified mail” messages will not change. We want you to continue to get those mailing list messages in Yahoo! Mail — and we’re constantly hard at work to make sure they are delivered to the place *you* want them.

Similarly, we need to ensure that the spammers don’t sign up for the service. Goodmail had a vetting process for this, and We will maintain a feedback loop with Goodmail to ensure both that this system is not abused and that senders really do act on an unsubscribe requests.

Miles Libbey
Antispam Product Manager
Yahoo! Mail

If a spammer sends out 1,000,000 spams and has to pay $0.01 each, that means it costs him $10,000. So, can he expect to make at least $10K from sending a million spams? Probably.

(Btw, when are you going to add my blog back to your list? )