Mea Culpa on GoodMail

I haven’t checked Declan’s site in a few days, but I see that he’s posted a couple of insightful emails about the Yahoo/AOL/Goodmail pay-for-email program I last week:

Imagine that you are an online service that needs to ensure that a customer order confirmation, or an equivalent critical transaction message, is delivered to the customer. Then imagine that you are offered a means of safely and reliably identifying this specific class
of mail, so that it receives differential handling. The incentives for a company to pay to ensure that delivery are substantial.

And that is what the recent announcement is about. It concerns a means of ensuring delivery of “transactional” mail. This is quite different from “marketing” mail and it is not in the least controversial.

This makes a lot more sense to me, and it makes me think my previous comments criticizing the program were too hasty. I thought it was a bad idea because much of the media coverage suggested that AOL’s long-term goal was to make all commercial bulk emailers pay postage if they wanted to reach AOL users. But it sounds like the purpose is rather different: it guarantees that high-value content like travel itineraries and bank statements will get through spam filters, while the treatment of other mail remains unchanged.

This is particularly important because many spammers do their best to emulate legitimate documents like bank statements, in the hopes of tricking users into clicking them. That makes it difficult for spam filters to tell the difference, and raises the risks of both false positives and false negatives. Not only do users benefit by getting their email expeditiously, but more importantly, the email would come with a “seal of approval” that will assure the user that the email is genuine.

If Declan’s commenter is right, this is not primarily about marketing emails, as the media reports I read implied. And it certainly isn’t targeted at bulk email in general. While companies certainly could use this service to ensure their monthly emails and such get through, many are likely to conclude it’s not worth the expense: 95% of their email likely makes it through already, and it’s probably not worth the cost to reach that final 5%. But on the other hand, when I purchase an airplane ticket, it’s pretty important that my itinerary reach my inbox. I bet Travelocity will be more than happy to kick in a quarter of a penny to make sure it reaches me.

So I take it back: this does sound like a promising concept. I should have done more digging before badmouthing it.

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