The normally sensible Lauren Weinstein goes way over the top in characterizing sensible anti-spam precautions as a Proposal to Exterminate Mailing Lists:
AOL, Yahoo, Earthlink, MS, et al., are proposing a limit of 500 e-mail messages sent per day as an “anti-spam” measure. Of course, this won’t stop spammers, but it would utterly obliterate all but the smallest legitimate mailing lists — unless, one assumes, you pony up extra money for additional e-mail allocations. Spam could turn out to be the holy grail of excuses for ISPs looking for a way to move into the lucrative world of usage-sensitive pricing.
OK, this is just stupid. If you have a mailing list of more than about 50 people, much less 500, you should not be hosting it through a regular email account on AOL or Earthlink. Period.
There are a dozen or more reliable, inexpensive, sane options to send mass e-mails to your list. It is completely unreasonable to expect AOL, Earthlink, Yahoo, and other ISPs to foot the bill and provide the infrastructure for large mailing lists to people who sign up for a $15/month dial-up account.
Do we even need to debate this?
Ed Bott 