Magilla Marketing’s phone rang a few times yesterday with representatives of top e-mail service providers on the line aiming to schedule interviews following the announcement that a bunch of them signed reseller agreements with Goodmail for its CertifiedEmail system.
For those who have just parachuted in from Mars, AOL announced early this year that it would implement Goodmail’s CertifiedEmail system, under which it will charge some e-mailers to have their e-mail practices inspected, their messages certified as non-spam, and their e-mail guaranteed to be delivered with graphics and links intact.
The list of e-mail service providers in yesterday’s announcement, with a couple exceptions, was an industry who’s who. It included BlueStreak, Acxiom Digital, e-Dialog, Epsilon Interactive, ExactTarget, Exmplar, Harte-Hanks Postfuture, Premiere Global Services, Responsys, Silverpop, SmartDM, TailoredMail, Yesmail, Whatcounts, and Zustek
The biggest name missing from the announcement was CheetahMail. No one from the company was available to comment. However, company representative Ashley Johnston said CheetahMail is implementing Goodmail’s scheme for its clients along with everyone else. It isn’t clear why CheetahMail wasn’t included in yesterday’s press release.
In any case, AOL and Yahoo!, two of the Internet’s biggest e-mail inbox providers, are implementing Goodmail’s CertifiedEmail program.
As a result, though implementing support for Goodmail’s technology is reportedly not trivial, the only way yesterday’s announcement could have been news for anyone other than the folks at Goodmail would have been if one or more of the major e-mail service providers either failed or refused to adopt Goodmail’s scheme.
Instead, we get the e-mail industry equivalent of: “Top Heating Contractors Agree to Install Natural Gas Appliances.”