Facebook testing $100 fee to mail Mark Zuckerberg Got something you'd like to say to Mark Zuckerberg? The Facebook CEO still maintains a profile on the social networking site he founded, but beginning on Friday, sending him a personal message could cost you. Mashable was the first to notice that some users who weren't otherwise on the Behoodied One's Friends list were being …
Here's a variant on the model: <a href="http://www.oneleap.com">OneLeap</a> allows you to contact influential people, with a fee to stop time-wasters that goes to charity.
Maybe Facebook should do likewise and pledge the fees to charity - ideally a charity chosen by the message recipient rather than Zuck's pet project.
Furthermore, I think the recipient should set the fee level, not Facebook.
I thought that already existed. The question to parliament is called "party donation" option and the question to mp is "dinner at the club"
Thats certainly how things work round here with the amount of planning permission for new homes (when there is a backlog of decent homes on the market already without needing to drain the floodplains)
This post has been deleted by its author
Just to kill this line of business, hackers/crackers might just raid banking accounts and paypal cards and apply to them charges from reaching all the MPs, behoodiedones, majesties, etc? Might be a way to inform more of the world of whom the behoodied one is just in case....
But, how about the reverse scenario of paying $100 to talk to somone. What if we can charge the tax authorities, city council, etc, to get a piece of OUR time. Wait... I must be off my purple pill....Or, is it green today?
I do have a facebook account that is almost NEVER ever used, and has nothing in it..... as you need to have one to contact any other user...
And I am getting almost daily emails, "You have more friends on Facebook than you think."
Well I don't "think", and if they know this to be true, then they ought to contact "all my friends" that I don't know anything about, and then get them to contact me, at my "None De Plume" almost pointless and worthless facebook account.
So telling me that I can pay to send messages... yeah and.... the person on the other end, where is the proof that they have even read it, or have even gone, "Select All" + "Delete".
"Oh my inbox has 20 million hate messages at $100 a pop" - I will ignore them and only use my internal corporate email account for my meaningful contacts, and phone for my business and personal contacts... and the rest of them, I shall ignore them all - the dumb fucks", says Mark.
Smiley - the irony of the bullshit is not lost on me.
I see a trend, my cat also has a facebook account which I use to sign up to various "you arent getting my details son" pages. After a friend of mine tagged some random stranger in one of their photos as my cat I started to get some random hits and spam.
Evil stuff and I cannot believe the amount of people who put their REAL details on there. Nuts.
This post has been deleted by its author
We use a similar system for our customer emailing, we pay a company tens of thousand dollars a year, in return we get Whitelisted with Yahoo, Hotmail, BT and a few other mail providers.
We handle financial services for our customers, so when a spam filter sees our emails it goes mental because of the wording we have to use to explain situations and products to customers (Finance, conditions, repayments, free blah blah). Before somebodies says to tell a customer to check their junk email folder, we DO, but many people either don't bother or simply have no clue.
Also some people will probably say this is profiteering. Before you do, remember its costs a lot of money to run these email services, the money we pay for the Whitelisting is re-invested in the Anti-spam systems and research into improving them. Additionally their are very strict compliance rules which are monitored and heavily enforced, if you break them, then you lose the whitelisting with no refund!
"We use a similar system for our customer emailing, we pay a company tens of thousand dollars a year, in return we get Whitelisted with Yahoo, Hotmail, BT and a few other mail providers."
Huh? I call bullshit. A third party can't white-list any email system I've ever been in charge of. Prove me wrong. Name that third party.
You can whitelist your address with third-party e-mail providers but you can do it yourself for free. I'm guessing this is how these 'certification companies' work they just fill out the forms for you.
I don't know why someone would pay a company thousands to do this. As long as you use best-practice guidelines for the relevant e-mail provider including SPF, domain keys, fixed IPs and fill out the forms (a couple of hours work at most) and then don't spam or be tagged as spam by a user and bingo your mail will have a high chance of being delivered.
The returnpath whitelist is a proven nonsense, if you get blacklisted you'll get kicked out anyways and also if you're not prone to blacklisting why do you need whitelisting?
Moreover I personally wouldn't do business with anybody who even considered using it to allow emails I'd ordinarily shit-can to skirt round my filters. See the problem right?
@ Streaky
That is definitely not the experience we've had, we've seen a 3-4x increase response from emails since. In regards to blacklisting, if you get on a major list then you may find your Whitelisting / Certification is suspended, but it can be re-instated once you've been removed from the blacklist.
I'd suggest actually your better of doing business with us, Whitelisting is NOT a one way street, we don't pay a large sum of money and then get carte-blanche to spam people. Far from it, we have to run a whiter-than-white email system. To get certified takes 3-4 months of external auditors combing through
1) Our Email traffic and logs with a fine tooth comb
2) Check our company historying
2) Going over our websites to ensure our unsubscribe process is quick, easy and effective
3) Our policy on Data protection is effective and we don't send unsolicited emails
Even after being Whitelisted we are constantly monitored to ensure we don't abuse the privilege and continue to ensure users details are treated with the up most respect.
"Whitelisting is NOT a one way street, we don't pay a large sum of money and then get carte-blanche to spam people. Far from it, we have to run a whiter-than-white email system"
But here's the thing, why do you need then whitelisting? Doesn't make /any/ sense at all. If you're putting in that much effort, your emails won't have any issues getting through anybody's spam filters and you're extremely unlikely to end up on any blacklists..
@ Streaky
We spend an incredible amount of time on the quality of emailing, from the email structure, to the systems that send the email. But we have a few things which run against us
1) the emails we send have a lot of financial related terminology which unfortunately is often buzzed around by spammers.
2) We send a large volume of emails.
When an email is spam "scored", these factors increase the likely hood of an email being sent to the junk email. The whitelisting we use is almost like a counter agent, it also has a few other perks.
"we've seen a 3-4x increase response from emails since."
So instead of shotgunning spam at everyone on the "500 million email addresses, guaranteed!!!" DVD, you are targeting spam at proven idiots? Personally, I only email folks with my advertising if they, themselves, actually ask to be emailed. Opt-in is good. Opt-out doesn't scale.
Paying a third-party for promotion is contra-indicated in any "Hi! We're doing this" situation.
I don't know how you can sleep with yourself, AC-spammer.
But I'm not surprised that you're AC, coward.
"I only email folks with my advertising if they, themselves, actually ask to be emailed"
That's the point doofus! Making sure that the emails people have opted into (or not out of depending on the implementation) actually arrive at their inbox and are not filtered out by the email provider
The company has to prove they are not spamming people to get whitelisted
Jeez
@ Jake wrote "you are targeting spam at proven idiots"
As I explained, these emails are to customers that have purchased financial products from us and requested information sent to them. Its in the customers interest that the information arrives in their inbox!
Who the f*ck mentioned anything about opt-in or opt-out? Its because of morons like you that people chose to use A/C. Now in future, make sure you are familiar with something before comment on it :)
.. is that by paying Facebook, they now have your payment details as well. The next "innovation" will be that Facebook will buy all the stuff for you that their system thinks you need.. If not, it provides at least some more sellable tracking data for those nice folks at the NSA:::
This is just the first of a series of more invasive changes to Facebook. They've now floated so have zero considerations aside from making as much money as possible. It's now their legal duty to their shareholders.
Finding the balance between acceptable revenue generation, and maintaining the 'trust' between Facebook and it's users is their challenge. One they're course to biblically fail at achieving. Should be interesting and quite funny though.
Mark, you have blown this money making idea by letting the world know you are married to Priscilla Chan.
If you were single all the ladies might have paid the $100 fee to mail you.
It looks like you have been outdone by your very own invention.
Some things are better kept private and not on Facebook.
Bit of wishful thinking on your part there. Facebook - and social networks in general - are certainly overinflated, but they're still garnering eyeballs, generating clicks and getting hold of people's preferences and data, and there's still enough money to be made from that to make it a viable business model.
Didn't they patent something very similar with actual emails years ago and everybody laughed them out the room?
Set fee for sending email, if it's legit you get refunded. Thus *in theory* reducing spam.
Personally I advocate cutting fibre (also cruise missiles in extreme circumstances) to datacenters who allow spam or outbound IP spoofing, but apparently I'm in a minority.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
