Goodmail Defends Itself

Through the good offices of Esther Dyson, I received the following today from Richard Gingras, chairman and CEO of Goodmail. After the break, some comment:

CertifiedEmail will only have value if recipients believe it has value:
that CE is an indication of the authenticity of a message from an
accredited sender who respects the recipient’s willingness to receive or deny
the sender’s messages.

CertifiedEmail’s Authorized Use Policies
(available on our website) dictate that the messages must be
permissioned-based email to existing customers or members of the sending
entity. There is a feedback loop that allows Goodmail to collect complaints
from recipients and maintain a reputation profile on the sender’s mailing
practices (that they respect permissions and unsubscribe senders promptly).
High complaint levels would lead to revocation of privileges. Since a
cryptographic token is added to each message it allows us to track message
volume and track complaint levels very accurately. Poor mailing practices
such as sending to non-permissioned lists would be quickly
visible.

Also note that CertifiedEmail senders must be qualified:

1. we
   accredit theentity to be sure that we have a legal path of accountability
   (we usevarious vetting processes to double-check physical addresses, how
   long they’ve been in business, etc, etc.);
2. we evaluate prior sending
   histories (prior complaint levels on AOL and Yahoo! for example) to be
   comfortable they follow proper sending practicies. Those are the only
   criteria but both are extremely important to the integrity of CertifiedEmail.
   We do not take all comers.

Our role is that of a trust intermediary.
We take that very seriously. We must. If we don’t we won’t be around for
long.

This is a business model problem, in the sense that the business model which works for the vendor (in this case, AOL) is not being accepted by the market. (That’s Gingras to the left. Handsome fellow…too much hair on top, though.)

The agreement between Goodmail and AOL gives AOL a split on per-message fees. Regardless of the merits of Goodmail’s system, this is unacceptable to the market.

I said it before, and I will say it again. There are other ways to work this:

• You can demand permission audits (which Goodmail claims to do), and give AOL a cut of the revenue, say, through an equity purchase in Goodmail.
• You can whitelist a group of third-parties (like Whitehat) which do permission audits.

A permission audit, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a check of a mailing list for permission to be on that list. A percentage of those on the list may be contacted, or the permission process may be checked, and/or a sample of the list may have their permission process checked.

The necessary permission process on e-mail is this:

• A voluntary sign-up.
• A message sent to the address which signed up, asking for confirmation of the sign-up.
• A confirmation sent back, either from a Web landing page or through an e-mail sent in response to the confirmation request.

In this way you know the person asked for the e-mail, you know this was confirmed, and you have a confirmation response. Most opt-in lists created over the last decade have followed this pattern, known as a "double opt-in."

All the businesses which propose to pay Goodmail for speedy delivery say they have gone through this process. They could prove it. Goodmail, or someone else, could charge them for it. And then their list would be whitelisted, as a list, with the audit being renewable on a periodic basis.

Instead, we have this dead tree business model in which people are charged a fee for individual messages, for a service whose price has no relation to cost. We also have an ISP raking-off a portion of that fee, with all the resulting implications, namely that those who don’t pay will be disadvantaged, that their mail will not get through.

The business model problem remains, no matter how nice the people involved happen to be. And Mr. Gingras happens to be a very nice person.  After all, he answered my e-mail.