Dear DearAOL.com: Please, give it a rest. You’re making sensible people’s heads hurt.
Is it willful ignorance or stupidity that drives Goodmail’s critics to continue spouting nonsense?
Latest case in point: the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Danny O’Brien’s anti-Goodmail post on DearAOL.com under the headline: “AOL Starts the Shakedown.”
Shakedown?
By Goodmail CEO Richard Gingras’s account, the company is rejecting close to 80% of companies applying for its CertifiedEmail program. AOL and Goodmail are apparently extremely non-opportunistic shakedown artists.
And O’Brien’s headline is just the beginning. His post is riddled with blatant falsehoods and intellectually dishonest arguments.
“It looks like AOL, rather than proudly announce their Certified Mail service, have flipped the switch on the sly instead,” the post begins.
Never mind that press release from Goodmail and 15 e-mail service providers last week claiming they had made their systems Goodmail ready, and press reports that announced the system had gone live. Apparently anything short of a ribbon-cutting ceremony with fireworks and a free buffet is an admission on AOL’s part that it is up to something sinister.
But wait, O'Brien isn’t done:
“And so much for the claim that pay-to-send messages would be limited to vital, wanted mail like bank statements and airline confirmations,” the post continued. “The first pay-to-send mail out to be so important as to bypass AOL’s spam filters: an Overstock.com one-day promotion.”
Neither AOL nor Gingras ever claimed that CertifiedEmail would be limited to vital mail such as bank statements. It has been clear all along that the CertifiedEmail program on AOL is open to commercial e-mailers who meet Goodmail’s criteria, such as acceptably low complaint rates. Yahoo! said it would limit its Goodmail implementation to transactional messages, not AOL.
O’Brien’s willful ignorance goes even further.
“But Goodmail doesn’t help ensure that non-spam gets delivered,” he wrote. “It makes sure that e-mail that is paid for gets delivered, and those are plainly not the same thing.”
Actually, unless Gingras is lying about his program, Goodmail is supposed to help non-spam e-mail that is paid for get delivered—pretty harmless and straightforward—but this description is apparently not sinister enough for DearAOL.com and O’Brien.
Then comes the inevitable misplaced, self-righteous indignation.
“Control over your spam filtering, and control over your mailbox should lie with you alone,” wrote O’Brien. “Nobody should have the power to rent out access to your inbox without your permission or your knowledge.
“AOL’s silence in rolling out their pay-to-send system is deafening.”
Sigh. Very dramatic. And very childish.
OK, one more time. And for all you Utah legislators and DearAOL.com members who have trouble understanding e-mail-related issues, read the following very slowly so that maybe we can avoid repeating it:
Those AOL addresses are not your inboxes, they’re AOL’s inboxes provided to subscribers for a fee that both sides think is fair. You understand the concepts of private property and voluntary, value-for-value transactions, don’t you? If not, Wikipedia has a pretty solid entry on it under “capitalism.”
Moreover, unless the whole AOL/Goodmail/e-mail-service-provider universe is lying—and trust me, if they were, Goodmail’s competitors would be tipping reporters off—the companies paying Goodmail are not renting access without subscribers’ permission. Companies paying Goodmail already have permission from the AOL subscribers to whom they want to send certified e-mail. They’re simply testing to see if they get a lift in deliverability and a resulting boost in conversion rates that makes the service worth the trouble and the cost.
If commercial mailers don’t get a lift in revenue that surpasses the cost of Goodmail, they’ll drop the service like an Asian chicken with the sniffles.
Also, Goodmail’s scheme is not the only way to help ensure delivery into AOL subscribers’ inboxes. AOL kept its whitelists, remember?
If Goodmail’s scheme blocks too much mail subscribers want, subscribers will leave for another service, and AOL will pull the plug on CertifiedEmail so fast it will make Goodmail’s servers spin.
It’s one thing to object to a company’s change in policy because it may adversely affect people who can’t do much about it, and to lay out those objections honestly in a public forum. Also, that some have grave concerns over the ramifications of paid e-mail is understandable. But the dishonest fear mongering that has marked DearAOL.com’s hysterical crusade is unconscionable.
