America Online and Yahoo have partnered with Mountain View, California-based Goodmail Systems to offer a certified e-mail service for businesses. It would allow businesses to send emails to members and be guaranteed of their delivery. This fee-based e-mail delivery service will be tested by AOL and Yahoo over the next few months. It would be tested by large companies and would allow legitimate e-mails to avoid spam filters and go straight to the recipient’s inbox.
According to Goodmail Chief Executive Richard Gingras, this service would allow AOL and Yahoo to certify e-mail and protect its customers from spam, online fraud, and phishing.
Gingras also went on to say that the partnerships are a significant step towards protecting consumers and businesses from spam and the many other forms of undesirable e-mail messages.
The fees for the service would be approximately a quarter of a cent to a penny per certified e-mail, and would be paid for by the sender. AOL hopes to begin testing the service in the next few weeks and Yahoo plans to follow suit and introduce the service a few months afterward.
The service will be wholly optional for AOL and Yahoo customers, and the fees would only apply to senders such as large financial institutions, whose e-mails are critically dependent on timely delivery.
AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said “This is about the safety of our users, and maintaining the safety and security of email on the web. As spamming and phishing become more sophisticated and complex, it allows us to stay one step ahead.”
AOL and Yahoo will be able to recoup the costs of providing e-mail to users through the fee system of this service. The fees will be paid directly to Goodmail, with a portion of them going to the partner Internet service provider. This money will then be used to pay for the expenses related to maintaining clean inboxes for their e-mail customers.
If the company does not pay the fee, their e-mails run the risk of being blocked, delivered late, sent to spam or bulk message folders, or not having any graphics or links visible.
The fee-based e-mail system will most likely increase revenues for AOL and Yahoo. If the testing stage goes well, this could also quicken the spread of the idea of a two-tiered Web where services that were offered for free are now being offered for a small fee.
“AOL and Yahoo believe this will help them identify legitimate email and lessen the risk of ‘malmail,’” said Jonathan Spira, chief analyst at Basex, an IT research firm. “It gives the companies that pay a ‘do not stop, go straight to the inbox’ filter.”
Spira also said he sees similarities between this new system and the traditional postal system, where the sender pays for the mail sent and the recipient pays nothing, and where senders pay more for certified mail.
Graham said that over the past 10 days, AOL has been meeting with companies who are interested in possibly utilizing the service to make sure that they understand the entire process. He also said that AOL’s Enhanced Whitelist will still be available to users, contrary to a statement made last week when AOL conveyed hopes to phase out the Whitelist service by the middle of this year in order to push the CertifiedEmail offering.
A whitelist is a list of e-mail senders whose e-mails will be accepted.
“The Enhanced Whitelist is going to remain in place as long as it continues to serve our members," said Graham. "We had a very successful week of discussions, both internally and externally with stakeholders and e-mail partners. We recognized the value of an Enhanced Whitelist for our members, as well as the marketplace.”
The decision to keep the Whitelist came after complaints from a variety of stakeholders and e-mail senders after AOL’s initial announcement indicating the elimination of the Whitelist. AOL still plans on changing the Enhanced Whitelist program over the next few months. Changes include lowering the complaint threshold in order to make it more effective and more difficult to abuse.
Goodmail performs background checks on senders to ensure that they are authentic and that the company only allows businesses to send permitted e-mails to existing customers. A cryptographic token is provided with each message so that it can be tracked. Both of these measures are taken to make sure that spammers cannot utilize the system to sidestep a spam filter.
Goodmail’s current clients include the American Red Cross and New York Times Digital.
Sources:
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.
aspx?type=internetNews&storyID=2006-02-
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http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=
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http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/
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