Goodmail has rejected more than three quarters of the companies that have applied for its Certified Email program, according to the company’s chief executive, Richard Gingras.

Gingras said most of the rejections are because the applicants’ spam-complaint rates are too high. He declined to specify what constitutes too high a complaint rate.

“Our criteria are very rigorous and the fact of the matter is that a lot of folks out there just don’t qualify,” he said. “Most senders say they’re on AOL’s enhanced whitelist and they’re not.” Gingras said that as a result of the national controversy over AOL’s adoption of Goodmail’s service, the number of applicants has been as much as 10 times as high as he anticipated.

“There’s no question that this level of awareness has drawn a tremendous amount of interest,” he said. “Given the strict standards that we have for qualification, most [Certified Email applicants] won’t qualify. A lot of these are prospect marketers and we don’t support prospect marketing.”

John Rizzi, the chief executive of e-mail service provider e-Dialog, said one reason for Goodmail’s high rejection rate may be that emailers with the most questionable marketing practices are lining up first.

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