More on AOL transition to Oath Infrastructure

AOL posted on their blog today about changes to DMARC reporting and FBL messages as they continue to transition domains to the OATH infrastructure. As AOL domains go to the new infrastructure, DMARC reports for those domains will be included in the existing Yahoo DMARC reports.
After the MX migration is done, they’ll start migrating the actual user mailboxes. Right now, FBL messages for AOL properties are coming from AOL and will continue to do so until the actual mailbox is transitioned to the new infrastructure. Once the mailbox is transitioned, then any FBL emails from that address will come from the Yahoo infrastructure. The blog post at AOL suggests signing up for both AOL and Yahoo FBLs during this transition phase.
It does bring up an interesting question as to whether or not the combined FBL is going to be IP based, DKIM based or a mix of both. It sounds like at least during some part of the consolidation there will be a DKIM only FBL. It could be that there will be some expansion to an IP system in the future. Or, it could be that all FBLs from AOL addresses will be based on DKIM domain.

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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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ISP Postmaster sites

A number of ISPs have email information and postmaster sites available. I found myself compiling a list of them for a client today and thought that I would put up a list here.

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The more things change

I was doing some research about the evolution of the this-is-spam button for a blog article. In the middle of it, I found an old NY Times report about spam from 2003.

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