Is Goodmail Selling Access to You?
Jul 29 2008
Let’s think about this expose in the NYT last week about Goodmail. Now I could agree with them in some ways, but rather if someone has a program that 1. qualifies for Goodmail and 2. Wants to pay for delivery then why is there a problem with it? Truly if the individual has opted in for your email programs you should be able to make sure that it is going to get to the inbox. If this means using a pay for delivery system (now it does not work at all ISPs as of now) then go for it.
Selling access to you might be a strange way to put it, but in essence the partnership is doing this, I assume, by creating a revenue stream for email for the ISPs. Am I wrong here? I would think that honestly that this is the only reason that an ISP would want to participate in this. The What’s In It For Me needs to be strong as if you are already doing everything correctly, playing with the ISPs right, keeping your lists clean, working in a double opt in environment… you should not need to have a 3rd party validate you outside of Domain Keys and Sender ID.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/23/goodmail-is-back-trying-to-sell-access-to-your-in-box/
Published in Best Practices, Deliverability, E-Mail Delivery, ISP Relations, The Spam Cops on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008
(2 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5) 
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July 29th, 2008 at 11:01 am
DomainKeys (or its sucessor, DKIM) and SenderID only validate that you’re who you say you are. They don’t say anything about whether you send mail anyone wants to receive — that’s where 3rd party certifiers come in.
Plus, there’s no way for an ISP to determine whether the recipients opted in to your mail. Every spammer calls their list opt-in, and they’re all lying. So there, again, human investigation is necessary — which is another niche 3rd party certifiers fill.
Now, I’m not going to claim that all certifiers do an equally good job of this…or that they’re all telling the truth about which ISPs respect their certification…but there’s a lot more to certification than just whether ISPs get any money out of the deal.
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Thanks JD. Love your blog as well. Appreciate the comments.
July 29th, 2008 at 11:50 am
Hey Dylan -
We do share revenue with the ISPs, that’s absolutely a top driver for CertifiedEmail; however two other benefits to ISPs are that the processing of CE ends up costing less (bypassing spam, content, and volume filters saves cycles), and the icon provides a consumer benefit, letting a consumer know a message really is from the sender (as opposed to the domain) it purports to be from. The ISPs are interested in all 3 of those things: improved consumer benefits; lowered costs; increased revenue.
Re comparisons to existing technologies like authentication, remember that the best a domain-level authentication will do is let you know this message is really from that DOMAIN. A phisher can readily purchase say “citibank-customerservice.com,” spoof the brand, and get a DKIM-authenticated message, since that email really is from that domain. CertifiedEmail is message-level authentication; each message is identified w/ a unique cryptographic hash (token) that is individually cleared by the Goodmail software run at the ISP’s edge MTA. Beyond letting a consumer know a message is from the domain it purports to be, CE lets a consumer know a message is from the SENDER it purports to be from.
This is why CE gets senders benefits existing technologies and third party whitelists don’t get: CE provides a level of authentication that is unavailable through existing standards. There are other security benefits though of the CE system — from line checking, sending quotas, real time monitoring …. We once detected a sudden change of the volume from a sender (it varied from its email “flight plan” so to speak) and immediately identified a compromised email server. The sudden high volume was indeed bad email and it was stopped before it was delivered.
Having said all this though … the thing to bear in mind is that CE is only available to the senders who are essentially doing everything right anyway! So all those best practices and technologies (like DKIM and Sender ID) — you should be doing that anyway. CE is just another layer that will — if you are already doing everything you should be — will help get your deliverability to 100% and your links and images turned on by default. It is still the industry’s only way to reliably do that, and the case studies we have (about 40 now) show an average CTR lift of 40% and business metrics lift (logins, rev/email, etc.) of 20%. The bulk of our business now comes from ESPs — experts in all the best practices that are a requirement for (but not a replacement for) CertifiedEmail.
Best,
David
PS I am a Goodmail employee in case that wasn’t clear!
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Thanks David for your explanations. We love seeing this feedback. I would love to actually get email from my banks and other financial institutions but the trust is not there yet. I know that programs like yours can make a BIG difference.
I am an eROI employee if it is not clear as well with many banks and FI’s as clients. I know that they would benefit as well.
Cheers.
July 30th, 2008 at 6:42 am
The problem is not that the ISP’s are selling access to us, it’s that they are not cutting us in on it. If someone is selling access to me, shouldn’t I get a piece of that?
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So I like that. Why not if I read your certified emails, you drop my monthly broadband charges. Done. We need to see about this. Or maybe you send me a gas card to fuel my ride?
July 30th, 2008 at 6:48 am
I don’t buy into “certified” email. I know that Goodmail has partnered with a few ESP’s - giving their service away free for 1 year to a select group of qualified companies.
This is what my ESP gets paid to do - make sure my messages are being delivered.
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You are right. This is what ESPs fight to deliver to their clients each and every day. I know first hand as we do it ourselves. It is a massive battle that many people do not understand. Why? Well we are only in charge of the delivery and not the content, lists and list hygiene. That is what makes it a really tough gig. Behind the curtains it is a constant battle to work on the delivery for clients. We all take it on as part of our gig, but I can tell you it is harder than anyone might know.