Certification

About those degrees…

There is a meme going around related to the Equifax hack that points out an executive in charge of security doesn’t have a degree related to security.
Surprise! A lot of the folks who currently keep us safe on the internet don’t have degrees in security. They just didn’t exist when we were in school. I think Paul summed it up best:

Marketing or spamming?

A friend of mine sent me a copy of an email she received, asking if I’d ever heard of this particular sender. It seems a B2B lead generation company was sending her an email telling her AOL was blocking their mail and they had stopped delivery. All she needed to do was click a link to reactivate her subscription.
The mail copy and the website spends an awful lot of time talking about how their mail is accidentally blocked by ISPs and businesses.

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

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.

Return Path Changes certification standards

Return Path recently announced changes to their certification program. They will no longer be certifying 3rd party mailers.

Yahoo turns on images by default for RP certified IPs

ReturnPath announced today that images and links from Return Path Certified senders are turned on by default in the Yahoo mail interface. This affects many of the other domains using Yahoo for mail hosting including Bellsouth, SBC, Rogers, BT Internet and Rocketmail.
Overall, I think this is something that Return Path can be proud of. Yahoo fiercely protects their users’ inboxes. They have even gone so far as to cancel contracts with certification companies when the level of certified clients was not to their standards. I have no doubt that this decision was made by looking at the quality of customers that Return Path are certifying and deciding that the certification is a meaningful and useful measure of the mail.
This speaks to the time and effort Return Path commits to both the initial certification process and the ongoing monitoring and compliance processes.

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.

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.

Microsoft delivery partnerships

Last week John Scarrow from Microsoft made a public statement on Deliverability.com about Microsoft’s approach to using available products in the email industry.

Yahoo stops offering preferred delivery to Goodmail certified email

A week ago, Goodmail notified customers about upcoming changes to the Goodmail Certification program. They wanted customers to be aware that Yahoo was going to stop offering Goodmail certified email priority delivery and guaranteed inbox placement as of February first. I’ve talked with a number of people in the industry, including representatives of Goodmail and Yahoo about this change.
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.

Yahoo and Goodmail

The industry has been abuzz the last few days with the news that of Feb 1, Yahoo will no longer be supporting Goodmail in their interface. I did get a chance to get a response from someone at Yahoo, but didn’t get a chance to talk to anyone from Goodmail. Look for a post next week discussing the breakup, what impact it has on the industry and what this may mean for other ISPs.

ReturnPath customers?

Someone posted the following question about ReturnPath in the comments:

Interview with Matt Blumberg

Mark Brownlow posted an interview with Matt Blumberg, CEO of ReturnPath, about the merger with Habeas. It is well worth a read.
I have not yet commented on the merger and how this is going to affect the delivery industry because I am not sure how it will. Some of the effect is dependent on what ReturnPath does with the two companies and how their policies change. Here at Word to the Wise, we have known the folks at both companies for a very long time.
One thing that strikes me about this merger is that it means there are few direct competitors left in the delivery market. Everyone currently in the whitelist / delivery certification market seems to have a slightly different target audience and slightly different business model.
ReturnPath has SenderScore Certified and the Safelist. To get on these lists senders must meet criteria that, while filtered through ReturnPath, are set by the ISPs. Many senders find that they can get consistently high inbox delivery just by meeting the ISP standards, even if they are not SenderScore Certified or on the Safelist. However, certification does provide senders with an assurance that they are meeting standards.
Goodmail has their CertifiedEmail product. While certified senders must also meet criteria, they are also paying ISPs for delivery. I have always seen the Goodmail product as more focused on and more valuable for transactional senders rather than other senders. This slightly overlaps with ReturnPath’s target market, but the senders in this market do have different needs pressures.
ISIPP has their SuretyMail product. This provides a framework for senders to make statements about the email they send in a way that receivers can reliably query. This is a slightly different approach, in that ISIPP does not classify mail for their customers, but allows customers to self-classify. The benefit of ISIPP is that the ISIPP framework is trusted by their receiver-users and can push back on ISIPP if customers incorrectly self-classify.
Different markets, different business models, different approaches.

ReturnPath acquires Habeas

This morning ReturnPath announced they had acquired Habeas.
Goodbye Habeas.
What have you left? Just footprints
in snow as spring comes.

SenderScore update

Matt has posted a bit more about the SenderScore Blacklist, following up on my post about the changes at Comcast. George Bilbrey, VP and General Manager, for Return Path followed up with him to explain a bit more about the blacklist. George says: