Goodmail in my inbox – on unsolicited mail

Alex Schultz, a good friend and ex-colleague of mine posted the following message on his blog:

I am confused. I thought goodmail was meant to fix spam or help it and yet here I have two goodmail certified mails from a company who I did'n’t subscribe to and have no idea who they are.

These are the first two goodmail certified mails I have ever seen.

Here’s a screenshot of his inbox:

Interesting….

Comments

[Charles Stiles]

Chiming in on behalf of Goodmail. The key here is to promote accountability and responsibility amongst legitimate email senders.

First and foremost, the messages you received were safe and free of viruses and malware. They purported to come from AdKnowledge and through the authentication of our systems we were able to accurately verify that AdKnowledge did indeed send the messages which is why they were rendered with the CertifiedEmail Icon.

Next on the issue of domain authentication, while I am all in favor of it, I have to agree with my good friend George Bilbrey. Domain authentication, in this case, would have done nothing to stop these messages.

AdKnowledge has undergone a tough accreditation process and has been certified by Goodmail as a certified sender. They must uphold to our acceptable use policy and terms of service in order to remain in good standing. And as we insist from all accredited partners, they must maintain low complaint rates. As part of our normal operating procedure we routinely investigate claims of abuse and hold the senders responsible and accountable for their actions. As a result of our investigations for these particular emails we received confirmation that they were received as a result of signing up for an AdKnowledge Sweepstakes offer on March 22nd of this year. The IP address used appears to go back to a name server based in Kansas but that geography, as you all probably know, doesn’t confirm anything and becomes circumstantial at best.

Regardless, his email address has been removed from their mailing list and we will continue to monitor for adherence to our terms of service and our acceptable use policy.

Charles Stiles
VP WW Business Development
Goodmail Systems, Inc.
www.goodmailsystems.com

[Yanni, Adknowledge, Inc]

It is not uncommon for a user to opt-in and not recall after a period of time. We should not assume that user never opted-in.

I sent a message to Alex & Tamara earlier with the opt-in information and the details of what happened. This user opted-in 6 months ago. When user doesn’t click on the first few messages, we take them off our mailing stream which is why he did not see messages from us.

As part of reactivation test utilizing Geo targeting, the user was sent a targeted message in July that the user opened. At the conclusion of the test, we identified a new message stream and communicated yesterday again to see if it will be responded which was posted here. We have sent detailed information to Alex of the opt-in date/IP/URL and activity date/IP and waiting on his response. When we didn’t communicate for so long, we should have sent another opt-in request that could have avoided this confusion.

Goodmail & Return Path are reputable companies and hold senders to a very strict standard. If you look through their accreditation process it is very thorough and senders have to meet serious of qualification as Tami indicated above. Additionally, they are monitoring mailing on a daily basis and are providing reports for senders to view their reputation which is much more helpful than the basic feedback loop that ISP provide.

[Tami Forman]

I can't speak to Goodmail's program but since Return Path has been mentioned, I did want to weigh in and clarify how our program works.

Return Path Certification requires its participants to obtain permission from email subscribers and to disclose how email addresses will be used. Our standards on this are actually quite specific and we check applicants' permission process before certifying them.

But of course we go much further than that. We also monitor Certified IPs against a number of performance metrics, including complaint rates, spam trap hits, blacklisting and more. And we disable IPs that routinely fail to meet our standards for reputation performance. Because of this, the ISPs we work with, including Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Road Runner, trust the Return Path Certification program.
It would not be in our interest to build Return Path Certification to give spammers a path to the inbox. We wouldn't have a business for very long doing that.

And to the specific comment regarding Certification programs as leading marketers away from best practices. This is completely untrue in the case of Return Path. In fact, we spend a huge amount of time, energy and company resources to educate marketers on doing email the right way. Honestly, we do have clients that grumble because of it – they want that fast, easy path that doesn’t require making changes to some entrenched processes.

The good news is that most of our clients ultimately see the benefit in embracing best practices. And, they see the benefit in outsourcing much of the day-to-day work of monitoring deliverability and reputation so that they can focus on designing email creative, segmenting their list, and creating offers that will convert. Our clients find that their investment in our products and services shows a very positive return for them.

Tami Forman, Return Path, Inc.

[Tamara Gielen]

That's my understanding as well. I hope someone from Goodmail or Adknowledge will step in and explain to us what happened here...

[George Bilbrey]

I don't follow. How is domain reputation a solution in this case?

[Derek Edwards]

So my question is: Doesn't goodmail hold all senders to a strict spam complaint threshold? If they do then this sender should be disqualified quickly. Or maybe they just have deep pockets! Perhaps we'll see a spam complaint "cap and trade" system soon. ;)

[marc]

I agree with Captain inbox, this illustrates that these certification guys are leading marketers away from the important stuff - for a start making sure people have OPTED IN.

[Catpain Inbox]

Oooh controversial!

Yesterday I mentioned that if you are a good sender you won't need certification, Return Path told me that they can still get getter results?
Here you are getting certified spam! Bring on domain reputation!