Goodmail is a company that offers a service called CertifiedEmail whose goal is to eliminate security risks in email, and it is one that many organizations turn to when they have important emails to send. Goodmail's customers include a number of big name retailers from Walmart to Old Navy, not to mention ISPs like AOL, AT&T and Comcast, and government agencies like the FBI and the FDA.
Two year's ago there was a bit of a media frenzy surrounding Goodmail's apparent arrangement with AOL; if you don't recall the exact players you might remember national news coverage of the "email postage" scare in spring 2006. Well, Goodmail's back with a new CEO and a new plan: certifying video email.
Goodmail Systems announced last week that four major Internet service providers will be adding CertifiedEmail to their repertoire of email filters. The sweeping partnerships give Goodmail automatic access to some 65 percent of US inboxes.
If a fish salesman's brother tells you his brother's fish is the best in town, do you take his word for it? Or would you think it, um, fishy? So when AOL's brother releases a report that use of Goodmail's Certified Email resulted in a 30% increase in response, shouldn't we subject it to the same scrutiny?
Leaving AOL further out on a limb holding its Goodmail playbook, Google said it will not be instituting a payment system to ensure email delivery to Gmail users. The power of email filtering, said the company, should rest in the hands of its users.
The high drama surrounding AOL's arrangement with Goodmail's CertifiedEmail service was further escalated Thursday after MoveOn.org, one of the company's most brutal critics, announced that AOL had blocked emails containing links to MoveOn's petition site, DearAOL.com.
Goodmail CEO Richard Gingras appears to have employed the Jedi Mind Trick to convince the California Senate that AOL's Goodmail arrangement was never about fighting spam and phishing. One imagines a room reduced to murmurs and page flipping as reporters dig through their notes from February.
Dean Florez, a state senator in California, will hold a hearing on April 3rd about AOL's proposed implementation of a two-tiered email system.
Plans by AOL and Yahoo to embrace and implement Goodmail's "Certified Email" solution, even with allowances for non-profit groups, has drawn criticism from a broad swath of the Internet-using public; we're going to discuss why this is a good first start if only it extended farther to metering for all email.
AOL will be implementing the Goodmail certified emailer system at the end of the month. This will create a new email tier guaranteeing that customers of Goodmail get their email delivered into the top of the inbox.
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