Saul Hansell at the New York Times reports that America Online and Yahoo are about to start using a system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered. AOL and Yahoo will still accept e-mail from others, but the paid messages will be given special treatment. (Update: Rebecca Leib notes in comments that ClickZ broke this earlier in the week.)
That's all folks. The door has officially closed on email marketing. Maybe this will drive more companies to start up opt-in RSS feeds and blogs that facilitate dialogue.
