Goodmail’s CertifiedEmail program allows senders to have more than twice the rate of spam complaints as its enhanced whitelist, according to documents obtained by Magilla Marketing.
The news seems to bolster claims by AOL’s critics that marketers who pay Goodmail won’t have to behave as well as those who don’t.
AOL maintains two whitelists, or lists of senders that meet certain good behavior criteria, such as low complaint rates, and as a result, have an easier time getting their e-mail delivered with graphics and links intact.
The enhanced whitelist is the stricter of the two.
AOL’s standard whitelist requires that senders maintain a spam complaint rate of less than three per thousand, according to a PowerPoint presentation AOL made to e-mailers recently.
The enhanced whitelist requires e-mailers to “aim for” one complaint per thousand, according to the presentation.
Goodmail requires senders to maintain a spam complaint rate of fewer than 2.2 per thousand, according to the presentation.
As a result, it would seem that a Goodmail-certified e-mailer can have more than double the complaint rate of someone on the enhanced whitelist and be guaranteed to have its e-mail delivered.
Richard Gingras, chief executive of Goodmail, however, said comparing the complaint-rate requirements of the two schemes does not paint an accurate picture.
“Using a single number to compare disparate systems for processing legitimate messages is akin to comparing apples to avocados,” he wrote in an e-mail exchange with Magilla Marketing. “While whitelists monitor single IP addresses, CertifiedEmail looks at the sending behavior for a sender across all messages sources—IP addresses, third-party service providers, etc. This provides not only a comprehensive reputation of a sender’s activity but also allows the sender's reputation to be ‘portable,’ meaning not tied to the individual message sources,” Gingras wrote.
In response to being asked if the seeming disparity in complaint rates means e-mailers can “buy their reputations” at AOL, Gingras wrote: ”At this time we have accepted well less than 25% of applicants into the program. Most do not pass the basic qualifying criteria. So, NO, you can't ‘buy a reputation’ with Goodmail. If CertifiedEmail doesn’t have the highest level of safety and integrity, it won't have value and we won't have a business.”
