I (and many others) wrote about AOL and Yahoo’s announcement regarding the enhanced emailer whitelist and the use of Goodmail last week, and now it seems like there has been a misunderstanding, and that the enhanced whitelist will remain in

(Let me start this with a disclosure: I do not like AOL. I don’t like their walls, which they finally took down recently, and nickel-and-dime attitudes.) NY Times reported Sunday that Yahoo and AOL are planning to roll out a

(Let me start this with a disclosure: I do not like AOL. I don't like their walls, which they finally took down recently, and nickel-and-dime attitudes.) NY Times reported Sunday that Yahoo and AOL are planning to roll out a

AOL and Yahoo are preparing to charge large mailers for “priority” delivery to user mailboxes. You can read all about it here in the NY Times or almost anywhere else online. Allegedly this is an anti-spam effort rather than a revenue-raising exerci…

Anything else is equivalent to big boys playing big games. Implement multiple solutions, and let the market and the effectivness of each approach effectiveness decide which is best.

My issue is not that AOL is using Goodmail. My issue is that AOL announced they are using Goodmail exclusively and phasing out the IP Whitelist, which effectively means that all mailers – for all types of mail (transactional or otherwise) must use Goodmail. This is a really really bad idea (for all the reasons I’ve said above.)

While I’d certainly like it if AOL used Return Path’s Bonded Sender, I care A LOT MORE that AOL continues the IP Whitelist approach and gives mailers a choice based on reputation – if I have high reputation, I should get the same delivery level as if I pay for delivery.

Charles Stiles, a representative of AOL, commented on this post that “AOL will continue to offer IP-based white list and enhanced white list privileges to mailers that do not wish to take advantage of the CertifiedEmail program.” This is good and – while it contradicts what I initially heard and what the press initially reported – moderates my concern considerably. I’ve continued to hear things that appear to contradict this position so I’m hopeful that AOL will clarify this to their customers, partners, mailers, and the industry in general.

That said yours was a thoughtful considered response and therefore not as fun to debunk as Wilson�s �excellent explanation� that you referenced in your post. So permit me to respond to both of you here.

First i can�t let this one go in Wilson�s post: �Bribing your way into inboxes�. Come on. That sounds like a politician with a sound byte.

Is paying the USPS postage equivalent to bribing the postman to carry my mail? Or is paying my ISP every month equivalent to bribing SBC to give me access to the Internet?

The examples used are misguided. Banks cannot reliably send you your statement by email today because they don�t know where it will end up. The alternative: send them by snail mail while killing trees and paying printers and the USPS a lot more than a fraction of a penny in the process. The good news is that if you do pay the postal service you can be pretty confident your mail will be delivered. The bad news is that if you don�t pay them they won�t pick it up

A little economic friction applied to commercial senders of bulk email will not be a bad thing. In fact I am convinced it will achieve a number of good goals, one important one being to increase the quality of the commercial email I receive.

As far as your concern about your Feld Thoughts email goes, I agree that this is something we must watch out for. In fact I wrote about this a couple of years ago in this ClickZ article. There are certainly issues we need to stay on top of when putting an infrastructure in place that enables transactions in mail, but you seem to be making an assertion that the good mail won�t get through with the Goodmail solution, and that�s a wrong assertion.

The problem with spam is at its core a problem of accountability. There is a bug in email at the infrastructure level that makes it very difficult to hold senders accountable for bad behavior. Goodmail has developed a very elegant solution for dealing with this problem and AOL should be congratulated for partnering with them and taking a leadership position to bring trust and accountability back to the medium. Keep in mind (as I mention in the article above) that you can make all kinds of trusted assertions with a Goodmail token. This is ultimately not about �stamps in email�, it is about bringing trust and accountability back to the medium.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I am a tiny (angel) investor in ReturnPath and an advisor to Goodmail. So I have a very small amount of stock/stake in both companies. To top it off I started one of the earliest email marketing companies, Post Communications (now YesMail) in 1996 so I have been thinking about this problem for a while too.

However, they are still creating a caste system between email marketers that can afford to pay to deliver messages and email marketers that can’t pay. The ones that can’t pay will not be stamped with “AOL certified”, their images will not be shown and they will not get “much needed consistency and uniformity”.

The last time I checked with most certification programs, they weren’t supposed to be bought and paid for. This is an obvious conflict of interest where a marketer is paying for AOL to endorse the message to the consumer.

What I would suggest is that AOL adopt Goodmail, Habeous and Bonded Sender Program.

It is obvious to me that AOL has chosen the certification program that puts cash in AOL’s pocket instead of a) choosing the best option for fair and ubiased certification or b) letting the buy side of the market (eg email marketers and their ASPs) have a say in the decision.

Right now, AOL is exploiting their unique market position to choose the program that benefits them.

I would much rather see AOL (and all the other ISPs) adopt multiple certification programs. Then, let email marketers and email marketing ISPs decide which solutions to adopt. Then, have ISPs correlate consumer spam complaints to effectiveness of each program and adapt delivery accordingly.

That would show real leadership.

Is that a possibility, Charles?

I’d heard that AOL explictly planned to phase out the whitelist approach by mid 2006 from a number of people that I have no business relationship with (both directly and indirectly). In addition, this has been reported very directly in the media, including the following articles (I specifically linked to the ClickZ article in my original post as it appeared to directly source this information.)

DMNews Article

ClickZ Article

I don’t believe in the Goodmail solution as an exclusive approach. Goodmail plus the IP-based white list and other accreditation approaches that don’t cost the mailer a tax for sending legitimate opt-in email is perfectly reasonable – if a mailer chooses to pay for stamps AND has appropriate accreditation, that’s their choice. If a mailer does NOT choose to pay for stamps YET has appropriate accreditation, then their mail should still be handled the same way.

I very much appreciate your clarification on the IP-based white list. I’ll be presumptuous and suggest that you reach out to the media that has reported on this and clarify this position as it’s been clearly misunderstood.

Re: Your suggestion that this is “sour grapes” – I’ve been open and direct that I’m an investor in Return Path. While Return Path has a competitive approach to Goodmail via their (Bonded Sender product, this is a small part of their business. The vast majority of Return Path’s business in this area centers around helping mailers improve their permission practices and reputation. While it’d be great if AOL supported Bonded Sender also, I’m much more concerned about what I viewed as a deeply problematic approach – forcing mailers to pay for reputation. I’m happy that you are NOT planning to do this.

Also, I’m happy to admit this isn’t my industry so I may be missing something but doesn’t this really solve the marketer’s problem and not the consumers?

If you want to help consumers try creating/enforcing standards around optout policies… speaking of ebay, I’ve hit the unsubscribe link the email they send me many times and I’ve still yet to figure out exactly how I can change my account preference to stop recieving their promotional emails. On the other hand some companies let me optout very easily.

I wish you’d create filters on based on these types of policies.

-Andrew