Sacramento, CA — Two of the world´s biggest email account providers plan to introduce a service that would charge senders a fee for their messages to bypass junk mail filters and go directly to a user´s mailbox.

Yahoo and America Online say the plan will give legitimate companies that send large amounts of email a way to differentiate their messages from junk.

Both companies have long filtered email by searching for keywords commonly contained in junk mail. But the practice sometimes falsely identifies legitimate messages as spam.

That makes life tough for businesses that rely on email. The plan is optional and would apply to only a fraction of people sending e-mail.

AOL says the American Red Cross, the New York Times and credit report company Experian already have signed up.