Goodmail alternatives

A number of Goodmail customers are scrambling to identify alternatives now that Goodmail is shutting down. There are two companies in the field offering similar services.
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.

Goodmail shutting down
Amazon announces SES email service

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Yahoo decomissioning Goodmail MXs

Yahoo announced today that they would be decommissioning the Goodmail specific MX machines as of March 24. Goodmail customers should talk to Goodmail about necessary transition issues. On Yahoo’s end, my understanding is that they are working to make the transition as painless as possible for the customers of Goodmail.
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.

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Goodmail shutting down

Yesterday Goodmail sent out mail to all their customers announcing they are ceasing operations and taking all their token generators offline as of 5pm pacific on February 8th.
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.

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Transitioning Yahoo bound email from Goodmail certification

In early February Yahoo announced they were no longer offering preferred delivery to Goodmail customers. By the end of March, Yahoo will have decommissioned the Goodmail specific mail handling servers. What does this mean for Goodmail customers who have no history of mail to the normal Yahoo mail exchanges? Will they have to go through an IP warmup period?
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.

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