There is a lot of discussion in the blogosphere about Yahoo! and AOL planning to use Goodmail and make marketers pay in order to get their emails through the spam filters.

According to this AP story:

“The fees, which would range from 1/4 cent to 1 cent per e-mail, are the latest attempts by the companies to weed out unsolicited ads, commonly called spam, and identity-theft scams. In exchange for paying, e-mail senders will be guaranteed their messages won’t be filtered and will bear a seal alerting recipients they’re legitimate.”

To get the story from the other side, you can read the response from Jason Calacanis of Weblogs, Inc. which is now a part of AOL. I also found this response from the Antispam Product Manager at Yahoo! Mail at this blog.

This is a development that you should be aware of if you are currently using email marketing as a way to reach potential and existing customers.