Return Path offers Return Path Certified. A number of large ISPs accept Return Path certification, including Yahoo, Hotmail and Comcast. IP addresses that are certified are not guaranteed to reach the inbox, but there are some delivery benefits to being certified. For instance, Hotmail lifts hourly delivery limits for certified IPs. Return Path closely monitors certified IPs and will remove certification from IP addresses that do not meet their standards. They are offering an expedited application process and managed transition to former Goodmail customers.

SuretyMail offers accreditation to senders. SpamAssassin does use SuretyMail as a factor in their scores. Mail from accredited IPs receives lower SpamAssassin scores. I don’t have much direct experience with SuretyMail, so I can’t talk too knowledgeably about their processes. A former customer has written, however, about their experience with SuretyMail. They are offering a half off application fee for former Goodmail customers.

The other option for senders is to find a good delivery consultant. As I said yesterday, a large number of senders are not certified or accredited and experience 95+% inbox delivery rates. Many of my customers, for instance, see 100% inbox without certification. There are certain market segments where certification makes a difference. But for senders who are sending mail that users actually want to receive and are engaged with, certification isn’t always necessary.

While this is a bit of a surprise on one level, I’m not that shocked. Ken Magill mentioned in August that Goodmail was on the sales block and rumors have been circulating for weeks about significant changes coming to Goodmail.

Goodmail has struggled to find a market since they first started. At one point they were even giving services away to customers at partner ESPs. Despite the free service, people at some of those ESPs told me they were having difficulty getting customers to adopt Goodmail.

Likewise, on the ISP side, Goodmail didn’t seem to have much penetration into the market. They had AOL, Yahoo and some cable companies, but not much else. And as of early last year, Yahoo removed the Goodmail machines.

I think the real underlying problem was that most companies who are doing things well don’t need certification services. Sure, there are a couple exceptions but in general anyone who is sending good mail is getting to the inbox. Even for companies where delivery was not quite as good as they might want, the marginal improvement at those ISPs that do use Goodmail was not sufficient to justify the cost of Goodmail services.

While I have the utmost respect for the Goodmail management team I think this result was almost inevitable. I never got the impression they valued the end recipient quite as much as the ISPs do. That was just one thing that lead me to believe they just didn’t seem to understand the email ecosystem quite the way that a certification service should.

I echo Dennis’ thoughts and well wishes towards the Goodmail folks. The experiment in sender financed delivery was well worth doing and I think they did it as well as anyone could have.

“Project Conduit (or the ‘Company’) is a leading email certification provider guaranteeing delivery of email for senders (brands) and their distribution or marketing agents,” the pitch letter said. “The Company’s core solution is certified email – an email delivery technology designed to ensure that the email bypasses spam filters and reliably reaches the recipients with links and images intact.”

Ken talked to Goodmail, Return Path and ISIPP. Both Return Path and ISIPP denied being the company referenced. Goodmail, on the other hand, responded to Ken’s inquiry with a short statement.

Several months ago, Goodmail began a large scale industry initiative to leverage on its successful email certification business and its unique enhanced email technology which enables video and interactivity.

While we courted participation in this initiative, we caught the attention of several very large companies. These companies expressed interest that went beyond participation. In response, to help us evaluate this interest and determine whether a transaction is in the best interest of our shareholders, we retained the services of an investment bank.

Ken’s article also discusses the implications of Goodmail no longer in use by Yahoo. Go read the whole article (and sign up).

Thankfully, no, they won’t. IP addresses that have been delivering Goodmail certified mail are being transitioned across to the Yahoo whitelisting program. Just because customers are losing Goodmail certification does not mean they will lose all their sending history at Yahoo. This is very good news, as senders don’t have to give up all their sending history due to Yahoo’s decisions.

I have heard some grumbling from some delivery experts that the ‘pre-warmup’ isn’t meaningful or useful. I strongly disagree. The reason senders have to warm up IP addresses is because spammers are very good at finding unused addresses and exploiting them to send spam. The warmup period gives the receivers a way to evaluate the mailstream from a particular IP and determine if the mail is wanted without having to subject their users to excessive amounts of spam.

In this case, Yahoo knows that good senders will be moving from one set of mail exchangers to another. They have nothing to gain by forcing those senders to go through a warmup period. They know what the mailstreams look like and can special case them. This isn’t a benefit every sender gets, in fact losing established reputation is one of the major considerations when moving IP addresses, ESPs or certification services.

While current Goodmail customers are getting this benefit now, they will be subject to the same spam filtering other senders face at Yahoo. Failure to meet Yahoo’s thresholds for good email may result in loss of whitelisting, bulk foldering of email and rate limiting.

More detailed information about delivering to Yahoo is available on the Word to the Wise Delivery Wiki.

This seems to be the final nail in the coffin for Goodmail at Yahoo.

I’ll have more next week on how senders can cope with the loss of Goodmail certification.

“We carefully reviewed RPost’s patented technology,” said Daniel Dreymann, President and co-founder of Goodmail Systems, Inc.  “We decided that we could build the strongest product offering for these compliance products by partnering with them.”
“The combined product allows both RPost and Goodmail to do what they do best,” said Zafar Khan, CEO of RPost.  “Goodmail’s CertifiedEmail protects the recipients of email by letting them know that the message comes from a trusted sender. RPost’s Registered Email service protects email senders by allowing them to prove that their message was delivered and what it said.”

Last week, RPost announced a partnership with ReturnPath to offer proof of delivery certification into the ReturnPath product line as well.

Yahoo was the first to respond to my request for a comment, and offered the following statements. The decision was made at some of the higher levels of management and my contact did not participate. I was told that Yahoo was looking to have more control over their incoming mail stream. They did not want to be contractually obligated to deliver email. The Yahoo rep also told me that Goodmail was in no way responsible for the Yahoo connectivity problems over the last couple weeks.

I also spoke with Goodmail. They also stated that Goodmail was in no way responsible for the Yahoo MTA problems. They are continuing to negotiate with Yahoo and are hoping to have full functionality to Goodmail certified email at Yahoo in the future. Also, Goodmail certified email may continue to see good delivery at Yahoo, but the certification symbol will not be displayed to Yahoo users.

I do believe Goodmail is continuing to negotiate with Yahoo, but I don’t expect to see any reversal of the decision any time soon. There are a number of underlying problems here, but reading between the lines it seems that Goodmail is certifying companies that send mail Yahoo users don’t want.

Last summer a number of people in the industry told me that Yahoo had a meeting with Goodmail and told Goodmail that the quality of the mail that they certified was not up to Yahoo’s standards. At that point, Goodmail dropped a number of clients and stopped taking on new clients. One colleague believed he had a slam-dunk application that would take days to approve. Instead he chased Goodmail sales reps for weeks looking for confirmation that his employer would be accepted. Eventually, he did receive a response: his employer was not accepted and there would be a full revamping of the qualifications for the certification program.

It seems, though, that any changes implemented by Goodmail over the summer did not improve the mail stream enough for Yahoo to continue outsourcing delivery decisions to Goodmail.

Quite frankly, I am unsurprised by this. My impression of Goodmail has always been they never really understood the role of a certifying agency. For any certifying agency to be successful, they must continually monitor certified customers and enforce standards. Goodmail’s initial certification process was fine, but they never seemed to follow through on the monitoring and enforcement. I remember sitting at lunch with one of their founders a few years ago and repeatedly asking the same questions: How are you going to police your customers? What are you going to do when bad mailers come to you? How are you going to enforce your standards? The answers I received were vague and left me with the opinion that they didn’t really understand what spammers would do, or pay, to get guaranteed inbox placement. I never felt they recognized the work involved in enforcing the high standards needed to keep their ISP partners happy with their service.

What distinguishes Goodmail from other certification services is that Goodmail doesn’t make recommendations to recipient ISPs. Instead, Goodmail partner ISPs are contractually required to accept Goodmail certified email and deliver that to the ISP. In this case, it appears the certified mail did not meet Yahoo’s standards, and Yahoo ended the contract. I don’t expect Yahoo to change their stance until Goodmail can convince Yahoo that Goodmail will treat Yahoo users email stream exactly the same as Yahoo does.

Patent #6,182,219: Apparatus and method for authenticating the dispatch and contents of documents.

Apparatus and method for authenticating that a sender has sent certain information via a dispatcher to a recipient is disclosed. The method includes the steps of: (a) providing a set A comprising a plurality of information elements a1, . . . an, said information element a1 comprising the contents of said dispatched information, and said one or more information elements a2, . . . an comprising dispatch-related information and comprise at least the following elements: a2-a time indication associated with said dispatch; and a3-information describing the destination of said dispatch, and wherein at least one of said information elements is provided in a manner that is resistant or indicative of tamper attempts by said sender, (b) associating said dispatch-related information with said element at by generating authentication-information, in particular comprising a representation of at least said elements a1, a2 and a3, said representation comprising a set of one or more elements, each comprising a representation of one or more elements of said set A; (c) securing at least part of said authentication-information against undetected tamper attempts of at least said sender. The dispatch relates either to transmission or to manual delivery. The apparatus implements the operations of the method.

Patent #7,240,199: System and method for verifying delivery and integrity of electronic messages

A server receives a message from a sender and transmits the message to a recipient. The server normally transmits the message in a first path to the recipient. When the sender indicates at a particular position in the message that the message is registered, the server transmits the message in a second path to the recipient. The sender can also provide additional indications in the message to have the server handle the message in other special ways not normally provided by the server. After learning from the recipient or the recipient’s agent that the message was successfully received, the server creates, and forwards to the sender, an electronic receipt. The receipt includes at least one, and preferably all, of the message and any attachments, a delivery success/failure table listing the receipts, and the receipt times, of the message by the recipient’s specific agents, and the failure of other agents of the recipient to receive the message and a an encrypted hash of the message and attachments subsequently. By verifying that the digital signature on the sender’s receipt matches the digital receipt at the server, the server can verify, without retaining the message, that the receipt is genuine and that the message is accurate.

Not being a patent attorney, I don’t know how valid the infringement case is. Given the industry push for authentication; however, the lawsuit may have further reaching consequences.

Does anyone have any reports or links as to whether Return Path are worth the thousands p.a that they charge?

I don’t have any reports or links handy. Anyone have any?

Also, what about competing services like Goodmail and PivotalVeracity?

Have a great weekend all.