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by donaldo 1923 days ago
Are we talking about the same Google? I don’t remember them taking money without my consent.
1 comments

That is the genius of the design. The trick is, you give millions of people "free" email. Scraping emails aside, the real money comes from anyone that "needs" to email a large number of gmail/yahoo users. So if I am a business owner and 30% of my customers are using yahoo and 50% are using gmail and I have a lot of customers, the volume of email I will be sending to those companies is rather large. After a point I will have to buy into a whitelist/approve-list to get around throttling or being flagged as a spammer. Google/Yahoo don't know that you are my customer after all, so they have to prevent actual abuse of their system given the massive number of email accounts they host.

So I have to recoup that cost. I pass that cost onto all of my customers by mixing it into the cost of goods and services. If you buy things from me, even if you are not a subscriber to google/yahoo, you have in effect paid for those services. This is somewhat invisible to the people with those email addresses but does actually affect them, if only a little bit.

Google would tell you that you can simply start with a low volume and ramp up slowly. In reality this is simply not practical for most businesses. This gets into discussions around queue-per-domain management and rate-limit-per-domain, but quickly falls apart when you have to notify a large number of your customers on a time sensitive transaction that is out-of-band from their web browsing experience. A modern work around is to have a cell phone application for notifications rather than email assuming you let your own customers choose that over smtp in their profile. Another work around is to use an email campaign provider that already pays into the whitelists, but then I have to give your email address to a potentially shady company that may cross-sell / cross-market to you.