"We were on track to be acquired," Dreymann told the publication. "We got a terms sheet, and they left us at the altar at the last minute."

Five years ago, when Goodmail announced that AOL and Yahoo would implement their "pay-to-play" email authentication system, iEntry CEO and WebProNews publisher Rich Ord raised some interesting points about the company: "What exactly would publishers be paying for? Simply the right not to have their email publications distorted and made useless to subscribers by removing images and links? Paying a third party in order not to have my publications messed with seem a little bit too much like a Sopranos episode to me. As publishers we need to ask ourselves, does AOL have the right to distort our publications and damage our brands unless we pay?"

"Our newsletter subscribers asked to receive our emails," he added. "If an ISP takes on the service of offering email accounts, there is an expectation by the consumer that the ISP will not alter their email. An altered email deligitimizes a publishers brand and can cause the consumer to falsely report it as spam."

He then added, "What has become clear over the last few days is that Goodmail is not designed to combat spam. It’s sole purpose is to generate revenue for itself and partner ISP’s. The only companies who could afford to pay the Goodmail fee are the larger emailers which ISP’s already identify as non-spammers."

Criticism of the service was even able to achieve bi-partisan support. WebProNews later reported: "RightMarch and MoveOn hold diametrically opposite positions in the political spectrum. To bring these two rival political action committees to a common ground usually requires a staggeringly horrifying event taking place, like the launch of New Coke. This time, it’s the proposed fees for delivering bulk email to opt-in recipients that MoveOn and RightMarch find difficult to swallow." Still, even the White House would become a Goodmail client. After all, they want their messages to be received. 

Goodmail lost Yahoo support last year, and according to Dreymann, the acquisition that never happened would have addressed this, but when it didn’t happen, he says he had no choice but to shut down the service. "I could not sustain the losses," he said.  Gmail had resisted the use of Goodmail in the first place. Google said that the power of email filtering should rest in the hands of its users.

Goodmail reportedly sent customers an email saying that they were working with ISPs on a transition process.

Despite the on the surface appareance of nobility to this effort, Goodmail has drawn its share of controversy over things like whitelists and ISPs’ utilization of the service. You can read our past coverage on Goodmail to get more info on that.

Today, however, Goodmail has announced that it has raised $20 million in venture financing led by Bessemer Venture Partners. "Inboxes today are so riddled with phish, spoofs, spam and viruses, that before Goodmail, you needed rubber gloves to open your email," said David Cowan of Bessemer Venture Partners. "At nearly a billion weekly transactions, we didn’t have to be geniuses to figure out that CertifiedEmail–secured by sender audit procedures and public key cryptography–is emerging as the industry standard for restoring trust to email."

The economy has not made it easy for companies to raise venture capital, but Goodmail apparently didn’t have this problem at all. Tomio Geron at the Wall Street Journal writes:

Goodmail has convinced email providers by offering more security for their customers and by offering a new revenue stream. Goodmail is focusing on consumer email providers and has not been integrated with business email providers such as Microsoft Corp.’s Outlook.

Goodmail expects to be profitable by mid-2009, Horan said, declining to discuss the company’s valuation.

"In such an adverse financial climate, we were fortunate to have our choice of investors," said Goodmail CEO Peter Horan."Bessemer was clearly our top pick, based on its unmatched track record in information security as well as its global footprint."

Yahoo is one of Goodmail’s customers, but Google and Microsoft are both absent from the list. These are two pretty big pieces of the email pie.

Goodmail Logo

Currently, many email providers filter the complexities of code that make video in email possible, sending those files automatically the spam bin. The idea is the same as last time, with that video caveat: senders pay between one-tenth of a penny per message, perhaps up to a penny if the videos contain any advertising to go with them, to guarantee bypassing of provider spam filters.

Once again Google is a chief holdout along with Microsoft. But those loudly alarmed last time could shatter some glass with their voices this time around because it’s not just AOL on board with it. It’s Yahoo, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner Cable and Comcast. This half-dozen represent about 75 percent of inboxes. If a similar arrangement as the one with AOL in 2006, each provider gets a cut of the Goodmail cash.

Yahoo is an interesting addition to an already notorious group of providers. Two years ago, they just played footsie with the plan, abruptly withdrawing their sensitive digits when water got too hot. The rest have never had any qualms about innovative ways to monetize their networks, nor qualms about upsetting everybody, including customers, in the process.

It’s hard to know what to make of Comcast’s participation in conjunction with other odd news today that the cable company is acquiring email newsletter company Daily Candy, which targets women shoppers. Peer-2-peer sensitive detractors note that’s another $75 million Comcast isn’t spending on network management, adding a network neutrality angle, an issue surprisingly part of this arrangement as well.

But we’ll get to that in a minute.

Goodmail’s new CEO, Peter Horan, argues at the New York Times’ Bits Blog (Sam Hansell authors) that this new authentication initiative could lead to automatic approval of other email application innovations. Imagine, for example, being able to make a purchase of a product without leaving your inbox. Horan is banking on that one especially to grab the attention of email marketers and nonprofit donation-dependent organizations who made such a ruckus two years ago about how devastating Goodmail’s pricey authentication could be to their bottom line.

Shrewd move, already a bit more clever than Goodmail’s previous CEO and founder, who often got caught up in his own words, especially in front of legislative assemblies. Yes, do remember even governments got involved last time, all the more reason to make a quieter relaunch of an old idea.

Commentators at the Bits blog took the news to be a reprisal of an old misconception: This means spammers can buy their way into your inbox. Other commentators corrected, mentioning how Goodmail certification in no way takes control away from recipients in terms of what they can block, only what they may receive. And, as always noted by Goodmail, certification isn’t a pay-to-ride option for unscrupulous emailers—participants have to maintain high standards to get the trusted sender icon to appear at the inbox—it’s a way email subscribers can know it’s safe to open an email.

And a way to make a lot of money in the process by shaking down those who can pay for it. Currently, free service-provider whitelists have served this certification function, but likely ESPs aren’t making any money directly by having them. This new incarnation of Goodmail adds that video word to differentiate between types of email a provider may want to send and/or block.

In essence, this means text mail would always be free to send, and means those small businesses and non-profits—churches, charities, (pesky) activist organizations—will have the future equivalent of cardboard posters and markers with which to make their signs, and always a corner on which to stand and hold them up. But if you want to make a video and get lots of people to see it, well, just like always that will cost you a little (a lot) extra. After all, you could just, since links were left enabled the last time everybody threw a fit, just upload to YouTube and send a link for nothing.

Goodmail and your friendly neighborhood ISP may also take a small cut of those donations—betcha, for PR reasons, they make concessions for non-profits, but no promises.

This is where that surprising Network Neutrality angle comes in. The old issue of Goodmail carries again the old issue of special treatment for fat wallets. A Bits comment by George, by George, hits the mark on the very edge of the target: "I expect that at some point the free column I write and send monthly via e-mail will be summarily trashed unless and until I pay up, and when that happens, the column ends."

No, George, we’ve already established text will still be free to send. If you want to send out your new video column, that’s where you’ll run into filter trouble if you don’t have the money to pay the troll toll.

Horan himself brought up the tired old FedEx example used countless times by ISPs to justify their stances against Net Neutrality:

“It is akin to saying there is U.S. Postal Service and there is FedEx,” he said. “Some people can pay a premium to get a message to you sooner, in better style.”

It’s a tired old example because it is a false analogy used to persuade tired old Congressmen who don’t understand the Internet. There’s no series of tubes, no dump trucks of data, no restraints of real-world physics, no planes, trains or automobiles or government (in)efficiencies and budgets involved.

Comparing Goodmail to FedEx is also a big mistake. It’s a trigger to launch a whole world of passionate agenda setters onto Goodmail again, and it mimics telecoms’ and cable companies’ arguments for a tiered Internet nobody wants except those who expect to profit immensely from the tiers. The FedEx argument already failed because it’s not the same thing. Why bring it up again?

Sam Hansell found a hole in it pretty quickly, too, by mentioning the postal service doesn’t sift through his mail to throw out 95 percent of it before he gets it. But again we have a false analogy. First, postal service costs money and that is the chief reason one doesn’t get a thousand times more junk mail at home. Second, ESPs are expected to filter out junk mail as a customer service.

What we’re looking at instead—if we want to keep this tired old analogy—is that the US Postal service has access only to Interstates that are partially blocked, meaning that they can’t always make it to where they want to go, while special underground high-speed pay tunnels provide smooth sailing to any destination. What we’re looking at is FedEx putting the Postal Service out of business entirely.

That makes Goodmail a full-fledged Net Neutrality issue. That makes Goodmail the sole arbiter of who gets to a cabal of providers. That makes it easier for providers (all of whom deal in video distribution these days) to block out user-generated competitors. That makes the wave of the future—Internet video message distribution—firmly in the grip of a few corporations. That makes it one more step toward your next step, your next pivot, one you have to pay for.

You want the truth? Spam is actually a small price to pay to keep email free. It’s better than the real-money expensive alternative.
 

Not All Goodmail Partners Have A Whitelist

Microsoft has yet to join the program, a deal that would boost that number to 85 percent. Bulk email senders wanting to bypass the spam filters at Yahoo, AOL, Time Warner Road Runner, Comcast, and Cox, can now do so for a quarter of a cent per email.

Or, as Goodmail competitor and third-party reputation service Habeas’ CEO Des Cahill puts it, at a cost of $2.50 CPM.

Goodmail unveiled its CertifiedEmail product last year amid a storm of controversy when AOL appeared to be forgoing its email whitelists (free sender reputation lists) in favor of fee-based Goodmail.

The press was quick to take note, calling the arrangement an email tax, or a kind of postage that could derail small online businesses and non-profit organizations that depended on bulk email. AOL decided to keep its whitelists after significant public pressure. Yahoo joined up shortly after AOL.

So news a year later that Goodmail is to be put into use at nearly all the major email service providers in the US (except Microsoft and GMail, which announced last year they had no plans to institute a third-party authentication program), sent déjà vu levels to new heights.

The most important question was: Do these email service providers have free whitelists and will they keep them? Or is Goodmail now the only option for bulk emailers looking to reach inboxes with images and links in tact? 

Spokespersons with both Verizon and Time Warner have told WebProNews that they will continue to offer whitelisting and have no plans to phase out the free offering. Cox and Comcast, however, may be a different story.

"Cox does not have a white list," Cox Communications Director of Public Relations Susan Leepson told WebProNews. "All email must go through our spam and virus scanning."

That includes email Cox sends its own subscribers, continues David Deliman, Product Communications Manager for Cox. Deliman clarifies that Goodmail is not a postage-type company, accepting payment to bypass filters.

"Goodmail performs a strict background check on all senders," he said, "and their CertifiedEmail is only available to legitimate organizations whose customers have already opted-in to receive e-mail from the company."

That doesn’t necessarily mean that bulk emailers can have their messages delivered with images and links in-tact. 

Comcast did not return request for comments regarding whitelists and whether or not bulk emailers would have a choice beyond Goodmail.

Though representatives for Goodmail and the ISPs that responded are heavy on the end-user benefit talking points (Goodmail’s Vice President of Marketing David Atlas was reluctant to speak to the sender-side of the issue at all), Cahill thinks there the monetary benefits shouldn’t be ignored.

"I think what Goodmail has proved is that ISPs want to make money off of email," he said.

The ISPs involved wouldn’t speak to the financial arrangements between them and Goodmail Systems, but Atlas says they have a 50/50 split in revenue.

While these arrangements may be beneficial to the end-user (a recent study by the ESPC showed over half of respondents were open to authenticated email), and definitely beneficial to Goodmail and the ISPs in terms of revenue, what of bulk senders?

Atlas says non-profit organizations like the Red Cross, who needs protection from spoofing, can get up to an 85 percent discount. Small businesses, however, are not eligible.

"They haven’t proved that senders can afford to pay Goodmail and the ISPs," said Cahill, who believes the phishing problem can be better addressed via the refinement of industry standards, which is what quarterly-held Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group looks to do.   

Magazine publisher Time Inc., a subsidiary of AOL sibling Time Warner, announced this week that a three-month test of CertifiedEmail’s trusted icon system yielded a 30% overall increase in positive response rates.

Time sent emails to the AOL accounts of active subscribers to its various publications, which includes Fortune, Business 2.0, and Sports Illustrated, with options to manage or renew subscriptions, pay bills, or make changes to their account.

From the release:

Now nothing gets the emarketer’s attention more than the phrase “click-through rate.” But is this a fair comparison? Authenticated emails, delivered with images and links in tact, received more response than emails delivered without images and links in tact.

It’s no secret that unless an emailer is on the EnhancedWhitelist, the apparent phase out of which sparked so much controversy for AOL earlier this year, or is using the CertifiedEmail system, that the branding and the functionality of emails sent is severely downgraded. ISPs routinely disable links and images in emails as a security measure.

Let’s imagine it another way. Let’s say Ford brokers a deal with Goodyear so that Goodyear tires are the preferred brand of tires for Ford cars, and the two begin cross-promoting. Jaguar, owned by Ford, publishes (hypothetically) Awesome Tires Magazine. Awesome Tires Magazine compares Goodyear tires with a competing brand of tires.

The researchers remove the valve caps and tread from the competing tires and conclude, after three months of research, that cars with Goodyear tires arrived at their destinations faster and with fewer mishaps.

While that is true, the researchers were using handicapped tires for their comparison, much like emails sent without authentication were handicapped. Apples. Oranges. But the conclusion sure makes an impression with drivers who just read the headlines.

For a more recent example, let’s consider the Cingular Wireless controversy over a commercial claiming an independent research company said Cingular has the fewest dropped calls of any national carrier. Sprint filed suit against Cingular because of the ad, claiming that the company didn’t have the data to back that up.

The research firm was Telephia, who expressed disappointment that Cingular had released the name of the company and said that they only provided the statistics. Interpretation of the statistics was left to Cingular.

Sprint also countered by noting the phone used to conduct Cingular’s road testing. Telephia used the Motorola T720 phone, which in addition to not being widely used for two years, also has an external antenna which gets better reception than the majority of phones used today with internal antennas. Again, it’s an unfair comparison.

So the conclusion of this study is to take Time Inc.’s findings with a grain of salt. This isn’t to say Goodmail is not a valid and good option for sending bulk email. It is a valid and good option, especially for institutions that handle sensitive client information.

But AOL has an economic interest in getting bulk emailers to use Goodmail and the apparent plan to require the switch received astounding negative response. Six months later, an AOL-affiliated company releases apples-to-oranges comparisons that yielded positive results for it, and champions another AOL-affiliated company.

And that automatically makes it fishy.

|

Drag this to your Bookmarks.

Add to DiggThis Yahoo My Web

No Goodmail In Gmail’s Inboxes

Editor’s Note: Is it getting too hot for AOL? Is it time for them to scrap their Goodmail partnership? Or is true net-neutrality and open access a fantasy of the Internet socialist? Discuss in WebProWorld.

Until now, Google had been very quiet about AOL’s controversial plan to implement Goodmail’s CertifiedEmail system, one that would require approved bulk mailers to pay a small fee per email in order to ensure delivery to member inboxes.

After Yahoo! made a separate announcement about the use of Goodmail, many had feared a domino effect in the industry that would cost bulk mailers millions of dollars per year. The fear that Google would follow suit stemmed largely from the presence of Google Vice President Jonathan Rosenberg on Goodmail’s list of strategic advisors.

But in a statement to WebProNews, Google Corporate Communications’ Eileen Rodriguez said there were no plans to implement any such payment process.

“Gmail does not accept payment to bypass its filters, nor are there plans to charge senders to reach Gmail users,” said Rodriguez.

Adam Green of MoveOn.org, one AOL’s harshest critics, believes Gmail’s announcement to be illustrative of email service providers (ESP) increasing reluctance to be lumped in with the AOL pay-to-send scheme.

“AOL is increasingly looking like the black sheep of the industry as respected titans like Google distance themselves and state for the record that they will not follow AOL’s lead into a world where the big guys can pay to bypass spam filters,” said Green.

“Today, Google set the dominoes in motion as AOL becomes a completely isolated and tainted actor in the industry.”

Indeed it does appear that way, as even Yahoo! Postmaster Miles Libby has been very pointed in delineating the difference between AOL’s and Yahoo!’s arrangement with Goodmail.

Libby in DM News:

“The first major difference is that we are designating it for transactional e-mails only. This avoids a lot of the, ‘All e-mails need to be spam’ kind of concerns.”

Rodriguez gave the impression that Gmail’s current spam detection system was an adequate defense for its users.

“Gmail has a superior spam detection system that gives users ultimate control over the messages that are filtered into their spam folders,” she said.

The concept that inboxes should be more user-controlled as a part of a larger net-neutrality argument is echoed by David Hughes, chief executive officer of Reflexion Network Solutions, a Massachusetts-based anti-spam solutions provider.

“I’m glad to hear them say that (referring to giving users ultimate control),” he said. “Email is a very personal thing. (AOL) should have understood this very personal, democratic, egalitarian aspect. And I think that’s where they blew it. Power should be in the hands of users.”

But proponents of the proposed Goodmail implementation call the free and open access philosophy (to which Google seems to ascribe) nave. Esther Dyson, editor of Release 1.0 for CNet Networks thinks a world without Goodmail is unrealistic:

“It’s idealistic and unrealistic in a world where there are bad people; you need to spend money to protect yourself. At the moment, the costs have to be borne by the recipient. Really you want to charge through third parties [such as Goodmail] who can work together with ISP,” said Dyson.

“People who are anti-Goodmail say, ‘Let’s have an intelligent design for anti-spam systems’,” she says. “I believe in evolution: there will be a lot of different attempts, and some will work and some won’t, and the best will thrive.”

And Google does seem to agree, though it appears they won’t be using outside fee-based services, that authentication is a good thing while also acknowledging that Goodmail is not the only option.

“Authenticating email so people are assured of the sender’s identity is a good practice that Google supports, and there are several existing techniques,” said Rodriguez.

But it is Dyson’s corporate Darwinist email philosophy that critics, like Hughes, oppose. Saying that AOL’s plan was “dead on arrival,” Hughes framed the AOL conflict as a classic battle of “the haves versus the have-nots.”

AOL’s proposed system not only takes the power out of the hands of users, but also limits small and medium sized businesses’ ability to get their messages to recipients.

Like Google, Hughes suggests that there are alternative means for email filtering that doesn’t financially restrict senders while disconnecting recipients from the filtering process.

“You would want something that was lightweight, that could be implemented without making huge changes. One includes the use of supplemental addresses. In this kind of an approach, you give the user the ability to define addresses on which to reach them.”

In addition to Reflexion’s own proprietary system, Hughes suggested the use of ESP options already in place that use “disposable” addresses like Yahoo!’s Address Guard or Gmail’s Plus-addressing.

“These are techniques that have been around for a while but haven’t been used in the corporate world. People are already doing this but it hasn’t been systemized,” he said.

And suddenly, there is confirmation from the AOL camp as well, that there are, indeed, alternatives to CertifiedEmail, and that there is more than one way to address the issue. After reiterating AOL’s commitment to combating spam and phishing, spokesman Nicholas Graham expanded the arsenal of weapons.

“It takes many weapons and defenses to tackle the spam and phishing problem; only a strong, comprehensive approach works in delivering results for our members.

“Email authentication tools – including Sender ID, and DKIM and Certified Email – are an absolutely integral part of this robust approach and to our ongoing efforts…a view shared by many ISP and ESP leaders in the marketplace,” he said.

Graham told WebProNews last week that CertifiedEmail had not yet been implemented and it was unclear as to when it would be put in place. After last week’s debacle with MoveOn.org, Hughes thinks its time for AOL to cut their losses.

“If this scenario was truly accidental, then AOL needs to look at this as a star-crossed sign that they need to abandon this plan,” he said.

Tag: Tag: Tag: |

Drag this to your Bookmarks.

Add to DiggThis Yahoo My Web

What To Do With Those That Disagree With You…

The event comes on the heels of national uproar over what seemed to be AOL’s plan to phase out their free EnhancedWhitelist in favor of Goodmail’s fee-based authentication service. AOL was quick to make a subsequent announcement that the EnhancedWhitelist would remain.

But MoveOn.org, among others, doesn’t buy that it’s not still on the agenda. Calling the proposed system anything from “email tax” to “extortion,” the traditionally left-wing organization united the most unlikely of opponents from Gun Owners of America to Cleanpeace.org, from RightMarch.com to the Democratic National Committee.

It’s like looking out the window to see Charlton Heston holding hands with Alec Baldwin. MoveOn.org has collected over 350,000 individual signatures to its DearAOL petition, and garnered support from over 600 businesses and organizations. In total, says MoveOn’s Adam Green, the list of petitioners counts 15 million people.

That type of opposition was enough to land AOL and Goodmail in front of the California legislature earlier this week to explain the situation. After the hearing, MoveOn and a host of other opponents lambasted Goodmail CEO Richard Gingras for reversing what had been the chief selling point for the partnership for the past couple of months.

On Wednesday, MoveOn sent out notices to those on its email list pointing out the seeming contradictions and using them as evidence of AOL’s loss of trustworthiness. But AOL members were not receiving those messages. Anyone who tried to forward the message on to AOL accounts had their messages bounced back with notice of permanent failure of delivery.

MoveOn, who has accused AOL of lying throughout the ordeal, was quick to send out notice:

“AOL was caught red-handed censoring email, and now the public knows their credibility is gone,” said Adam Green, a spokesperson for MoveOn.org Civic Action.

“Think about it. AOL’s first reaction was to tell reporters that the DearAOL.com Coalition were spammers, and their second reaction was to unblock our emails. They can’t both be true – why would AOL unblock the email of spammers? AOL was caught censoring email, then they were caught lying about our coalition, and in the end AOL proved they cannot be trusted to preserve the free and open Internet.”

The timing of the blockage is what makes many suspicious of AOL’s action – a fact that is either damning or unfortunate. But AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham told WebProNews that the problem was the result of a technical glitch during system upgrades, and that technicians were working on the problem long before MoveOn sent them notice.

“We noticed it early on Thursday. We were contacted by someone at MoveOn.org around 12:45 and were well on our way to a fix,” said Graham.

Graham said that at least 50 or 60 websites were affected by the glitch, including DearAOL.com, and called the incident “regrettable.”

“No medium is going to operate seamlessly every day,” said Graham. “We offer our regrets to anyone that’s been involved. It involves some very complicated software and hardware. We were able to fix it within 9 hours.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, however, isn’t buying that explanation, echoing sentiments from many who believe email blocking often occurs, but the high profile of MoveOn.org brought the issue to light.

“The fact is, ISPs like AOL commonly make these kinds of arbitrary decisions – silently banning huge swathes of legitimate mail on the flimsiest of reasons – every day, and no-one hears about it,” said Danny O’Brien, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“AOL’s planned CertifiedEmail system would let them profit from this power by offering to charge legitimate mailers to bypass these malfunctioning filters.”

ClickZ, AOL’s chief media apologist since the situation began, and blogger Kevin Newcomb thinks that MoveOn is “tilting at windmills.”

“AOL’s explanation makes more sense than the coalition’s scenario,” writes Newcomb. “The DearAOL petition has been circulating freely through AOL’s e-mail system since February, so it seems a bit odd that the company would suddenly decide to begin blocking them two months later.”

The oddness here, though, is the timing. It seems to many to be very suspect that – as the situation was reaching fever pitch, after months of being slammed by everyone, after the DearAOL petition was gaining critical mass, after contradictory statements were made and illuminated in the California legislature — that the DearAOL.com URLs were suddenly prevented from reaching emails a day after MoveOn.org’s email blitz about the week’s events.

It was either an orchestrated glitch or an incredibly unfortunate coincidence. Either way, the Goodmail CertifiedEmail/AOL endeavor has become a fiasco of epic proportions.

Tag: |

Drag this to your Bookmarks.

Add to DiggThis Yahoo My Web

Goodmail Blows Up

“To suggest that the introduction of CertifiedEmail is going to prevent spammers from sending spam or phishers from trying to phish — we have not said it, nor would any expert say it,” Gingras told California legislators last week.

A person that pays close attention to wording may analyze that statement on a semantic level and highlight the words “sending” and “trying.” But, as many have noted from the beginning, the AOL/Goodmail fiasco has been a fast-talking bonanza from the accused, who have insisted that what was said is not what they meant.

DM News quotes Sen. Dean Florez’ surprise at the statement:

“That’s what I thought was the selling point: that it was going to reduce spam and phishing,” said state Sen. Dean Florez, a Democrat who chairs the state Senate Select Committee on E-Commerce, Wireless Technology and Consumer Driven Programming.

Indeed, that was certainly the impression people were given when AOL’s public relations nightmare began with a phantom statement (not statement, a memo) from AOL Postmaster Charles Stiles in late January.

AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham and Gingras spent weeks on the phone following the snafu, defending the Certified Email program (and denying what seemed apparent plans to charge for guaranteed delivery of bulk email). In light of the most recent comments, the two should consider getting together to get their stories straight.

The week before the hearing, Graham disagreed with Gingras. “As we get ready to testify at the hearing next week, we are also working diligently to protect our members’ safety and security by preparing implementation of the anti-spam, anti-phishing, CertifiedEmail program,” he said.

When questioned about that statement, Graham fell back on the old that’s-not-what-I-meant routine.

“We have never claimed that CertifiedEmail will end all spam; there is no magic silver bullet,” Graham told DM News.

What he meant to say was:

“It helps us increase e-mails of good, trusted, authenticated e-mail … and that’s what consumers want. If we can put an end to spoofs, scams and hoaxes by giving legitimate senders of e-mail a new path, a new way to send e-mail, we believe more phishers will give up and throw in the towel.”

So, CertifiedEmail is not meant to end spam and phishing, but is meant to end spam and phishing.

A quick review of statements made:

From the Phantom Memo:

AOL announced a partnership with Goodmail Systems in October 2005 to provide a CertifiedEmail premium delivery service – a new class of email that will help shield AOL Members from fraud and phishing.

From an interview with WebProNews:

“We have an email ecosystem with serious problems,” said Gingras. “If you have an open medium, bad actors are going to take advantage of this.” CertifiedEmail aims to address those problems.

“What we offer goes far beyond what the EnhancedWhitelist has ever offered. Whitelists can be gamed all the time.”

Graham has been vigilant in labeling detractors of AOL’s CertifiedEmail implementation as purveyors of propaganda and misinformation, even if the misinformation seem to originate from AOL.

One of those spreading the misinformation Graham spoke of was perhaps MoveOn.org and their petition against the program signed by some 500 businesses, labor groups, non-profits, and citizens. The organization’s DearAOL campaign labeled the Goodmail arrangement an “email tax.”

MoveOn was very pointed in comments after the hearing. ClickZ blogger Kate Kaye accuses MoveOn of muddling the issue. MoveOn.org civil communications director, Adam Green, suggested to Kaye that Goodmail and AOL’s credibility is out the window.

“Goodmail was forced to admit publicly that AOL’s pay-to-send system would do nothing to prevent spam. Goodmail’s admission debunked one of the prime lies that AOL has been telling the media and the public for the last month, and blew a hole right through AOL’s credibility and every single promise they’ve made to the public in this debate. Their days of saying ‘trust us, we won’t hurt email’ are over – their trust is gone.”

Graham responded by saying Green was “making very selective, unreasonable charges.”

It’s true that this may indeed be a battle of semantics – a hedge that allows AOL and Goodmail to assert that how statements were interpreted was not the intention of their words.

But like the initial problem of the Phantom Memo, where everyone on God’s green earth but AOL interpreted it as a press release, everyone but Goodmail apparently interpreted the service as an antispam service.

Using the “we never said that” defense a second time is wearing a bit thin on those paying close attention, suggesting that the Jedi Mind Trick only works in the movies.

Tag: |

Drag this to your Bookmarks.

Add to DiggThis Yahoo My Web

AOL Postmaster Charles Stiles has agreed to testify at the hearing of the California Senate Select Committee on E-Commerce, Wireless Technology and Consumer Driven Programming. Florez has also requested AOL delay its plans to start using Goodmail’s “CertifiedEmail” system as “a matter of good faith.”

“The willingness of the major entities involved to come before the California Senate and testify about this proposal is very promising for consumers,” Florez said. “I can only hope that same spirit of cooperation will lead AOL to agree to postpone this until a very concerned public can get their questions answered.”

Goodmail will also be in attendance for the hearing. The timing comes as AOL’s schedule for implementing CertifiedEmail occurs this weekend. Florez hopes to have a response from AOL on the matter by the end of business today.

In a statement on the Senator’s site, several user concerns about CertifiedEmail’s impact on email services have been mentioned. The company has previously addressed one common concern, “that advertisers will pay the fee to circumvent spam filters”:

Many of the topics Florez and the Committee may address could have answers already, based on Goodmail’s summary of responses to numerous concerns previously addressed. And of course there is another option for stopping spam: postage for all email.

—

Add to | DiggThis | Yahoo! My Web

Drag this to your Bookmarks.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

That’s right, email postage or metering is a good idea, today, for a couple of reasons. You can read on for more, or go ahead and flame away immediately without going any farther.

Still here? Excellent.

Way back in the days when the World Wide Web had started progressing from baby steps to more confident movement, the inventor of Ethernet, Bob Metcalfe, suggested the need for a metered email approach not for the future, but right then in 1997.

Several things were missing or lacking in 1997 that we have today – RSS feeds, instant messaging, wikis, and blogs. Creating a website, or at minimum a single page, usually required a cursory understanding of HTML.

Email communication grew in usage and importance, and spam promptly followed when bulk mailers realized no laws restrained their inbox-filling methods. Thus, Metcalfe said the Internet’s economics needed a fix:

Again, this is 1997. Almost a decade later, laws have been enacted to fight spam, technology has been improved to filter those messages. Yet I routinely delete hundreds of spam messages a day, more so than I did in years past, mostly because the spammers have moved out of the US.

Making everyone pay for email, yes, everyone, does two things. It removes the essentially cost-free efficiency of sending out billions of junk messages every day. And it encourages companies that do email marketing to be very rigorous in keeping their email databases free of invalid addresses and using opt-in subscription methods.

Someone much smarter than I am will have to determine what kind of impact freeing up the Internet from the burden of billions of spams a day would have on network performance. Assuming that person hasn’t already flamed me for playing devil’s advocate for metering email, of course.

Clever people who want to work around email metering have options available to them today. RSS feeds come to mind immediately. Find a business, a cause, a blogger that you like, just hit the RSS button to add it to your feed reader.

That’s fine for the communications that come from a website. For personal communication, a family can set up a wiki or a blog with access limited to just those family members. PBWiki.com offers one example of how this can be done. Text editing in a blog or wiki is no more difficult that working with rich-text email.

ISPs generally offer free website hosting to their customers. Those same ISPs can make a wiki or blog product part of the service being paid for by the customer.

Instant messaging, whether by text or voice, has already exceeded email for younger Internet users. They will grow into an online audience that has already pushed email aside, so they won’t miss it greatly.

Then, email would regain its value. Messages appearing in one’s inbox would more likely be of importance rather than pharmaceutical come-ons or jokes that have been forwarded hundreds of times. Metering email imposes responsibility on those who generate it.

Haha, responsibility and the Internet community. I make myself laugh sometimes.

Naturally, issues of implementation arise. It’s one thing to institute a national email postage or metering policy; how do you do it on a global scale?
Who decides how much to charge?
What kind of discounts can be offered to non-profit charitable groups?
Wouldn’t deep-pocketed companies, the Wal-Marts of the world, dominate inboxes through economics?

No idea, really. But email gets closer to useless with every hundred spams I delete. There has to be a solution.

—
Tag: |

Add to | DiggThis | Yahoo! My Web

Drag this to your Bookmarks.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.