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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.

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.