You may have seen some of the recent media swirl around our decision (and that of Yahoo!) to partner with a company called Goodmail which "certifies" mail from some large companies and organizations by charging them a fraction of a cent and putting a special icon on each mail.Truthfully, the whole thing has been a tempest in a teapot. A couple facts:1) Consumers don’t — and won’t — pay a thing. This program is only for large companies and other mailers who want to make sure that their legitimate, opt-in e-mail reaches its intended recipients.2) You can’t buy your way past our spam filers. Our industry-leading filters, which have reduced spam by 75% for our members, will stay intact. If members refer mail as spam, even from a certified sender, we will take action, and — if appropriate — even suspend their certification.3) The program is totally optional, not required. If your company doesn’t want to participate, that’s fine. Your mail will still get through if it doesn’t violate our normal spam filters.4) We are keeping our existing "enhanced white list". An early communication from us got this wrong, but we are keeping our existing "enhanced white list" of senders who have met our highest anti-spam standards.
5) This is good for consumers and for businesses. If e-mail costs a little money to send, then legitimate companies have an incentive to send less of it, which means less mail in your in-box. On the other hand, if businesses are sure that their mail will get through, they can more effectively reach their customers with important news and information, increasing the value of each mail. Everybody wins.We honestly don’t think we’ll make a lot of money on this. We did this because we compared the various options, and Goodmail had the best system to reduce spam while increasing the value of e-mail for businesses. If you listen closely, however, you’ll hear the sound of a lot of sour grapes being squashed by Goodmail’s competitors. They didn’t like our decision to go with another company, but we think you will. Give us a chance to implement this system, and let me know what you think.
I have been with AOL since the beginning (10+ years) and frankly, I NO LONGER BELIEVE what AOL says. IF #4 above is actually true, it is because We, the people, cried out and AOL backtracked, NOT because of a communication error. We, the people, understood very clearly what AOL was trying to do and I for one, am STILL not satisfied with AOL’s response to the situation. If this new tiered pay-to-play email system takes affect, I plan on leaving the AOL.
a long time member is against the aol goodmail. Wants to protest that.
What if I don’t WANT the paid adverts flooding my inbox? I can assure you that I do NOT want paid access to my inbox, against my wishes, any more than I want unpaid access.The comment “everybody wins” means that AOL and the paid advertisers win, not the subscribers.Please don’t do this, you’ll lose at least this 10+ year customer.
It’s really easy to report a “breaking story” when you don’t have all the facts. Frankly, it upsets me because no one took the time to let AOL respond to these claims before “breaking” the story to the AOL masses and it’s simply BAD journalism.
I really shouldn’t have heard about that from MoveOn.org before AOL.
Curious. I had an on-line technical support discussion yesterday with AOL and was told that the new “certified” mail would NOT be stopped by the AOL spam filters. So Ted, who is wrong, your unofficial site here, or the official AOL support services – which I’ve kept the transcript?
Ted –As one of Goodmail’s quasi-competitors who has been vocal about this issue, I thought it was worth commenting here. As you know, AOL first announced its relationship with Goodmail several months ago, so the recent comments and news were not related to your deal with them. Our comments were really just sparked by #4 above, the miscommunication about the shutting down of the enhanced whitelist. While it might have been bad for us as a company, we also felt this was a bad move for email senders. Many of our clients agreed, so as industry leaders in email publishing/marketing, we spoke out.As soon as the miscommunication was corrected, we publicly (on CNBC and in many blog postings and reporter interviews) and privately thanked AOL for the clarification, then we moved on. We continue to support this move and think it’s the right way to go.We have no sour grapes and have had a productive working relationship with AOL for several years that we hope to continue. Our solutions for clients — both on the whitelist front and on the organic deliverability front — are both highly compatible with AOL’s anti-spam philosophy. We are confident that our solutions, the results we’ve generated in helping mailers treat AOL subscribers better (generating reduced volumes of mail and reduced complaints), and the strength of our ISP relations team will keep our relationship with you strong.I apologize for any misunderstanding around our comments on this topic. Matt BlumbergChairman & CEOReturn Path, Inc.