Having His Say: The Case for Trusted-Class E-mail

It’s been predicted for a long time. Studies have been commissioned, facts found, dire predictions made. Scenarios have run from the very gloomy – the rapid displacement of paper-based bills, payments, and even personal correspondence – to the slightly gloomy, in which the volume of First and Standard (bulk) class mail sent in the U.S. drops more gradually as e-mail takes over more and more of the volume, according to an Institute for the Future study prepared for the President’s Commission on the U.S. Postal Service.

According to the USPS financial and operating statements, total volume for April 2006 compared with April 2005 was down in all classes of mail. First Class (bills, transaction messages, statements, payments) declined 2.4%, Standard Mail (marketing messages) down 2.5%, and Periodicals 0.5%. Direct mailers, take notice: The medium is officially on the wane.

Everyone understands the obvious economic advantages of e-mail over physical mail. But can we really rely on e-mail? When a marketer pays $0.39 to send a piece of First Class mail through the Postal Service, he doesn’t worry about the integrity of the postal system, doubt the final disposition of that message, or wonder how it will be regarded by the recipient. You can trust the USPS with a high degree of confidence that the message will be delivered, and delivered as sent, while the recipient can reasonably trust that the mail as truly from the sender it appears to be from. The USPS enjoys a 99.75% delivery rate, and receipt of a First Class mail can be considered legal notice for business purposes. Mail fraud is relatively rare, with 3,000 postal inspectors aggressively policing potential criminal activity. With a 95% conviction rate, these enforcers are a lot more effective than spam traps and whatnot in the online world.

In the real world, the Postal Service delivers the mail as you wrote it; your brand is displayed as intended. The Postal Service does not see the words “free” and “larger” in your letter and decide it doesn’t qualify for delivery. The USPS postmark represents a service that is highly reliable and a proven model for marketers who spent $56.6 billion dollars on it in 2005, according to direct marketing expert Robert Coen of media agency Universal McCann. The phrase “lost in the mail” as spoken by someone regarding where his payment is has roughly the moral equivalency of “my dog ate my homework.” But in the world of e-mail? Alas, it’s an entirely plausible excuse.

Yet economics being what they are, real-world direct mail is indeed shrinking. Can e-mail fill the gap? Possibly, but the medium is still at an adolescent stage of development. The highly open and distributed nature of e-mail (like the Internet more broadly) has helped it grow quickly in social and economic importance. Its strengths – that it is free, open, and anonymous – have become its weaknesses. Spammers and phishers have exploited these attributes and inundated the system with fraudulent and unwanted e-mail, placing an enormous burden on the recipients and the mailbox providers (such as Yahoo!). Mailbox providers have responded to protect recipients by taking tough measures reducing the privileges of all bulk senders (including legitimate senders).

Unlike the reliable First Class Mail product from the USPS, e-mail suffers from

• poor and uncertain delivery. According to e-mail auditing firm Pivotal Veracity, 20% of legitimate e-mail is blocked or put in the spam folder, and the sender has no reliable method to figure out which messages don’t make it.

• mangling of message copy and creativity. Content can be blocked or images are suppressed by default.

• low trust by recipients. Consumers are less trusting of commercial messages, particularly those from senders that have had their brands co-opted by phishers. For example, nearly 55% of consumers delete all bank messages.

Will e-mail grow up, or should we just move on to new technologies such as RSS and SMS/MMS? The truth is that with 150 million users in the U.S. today, e-mail has become the common denominator for reaching some of the most important consumer segments. Yet at $885 million in 2005, e-mail marketing budgets are less than 2% of direct mail budgets, and they’re forecast to drift up only slightly to just over $1 billion in 2010, according to Jupitermedia. Without greater assurances to senders and recipients regarding the reliability, deliverability, authenticity, and even legal standing of e-mail messages, the medium’s growth will become stunted.

How can the triangle of trust linking volume e-mail senders, mailbox providers, and recipients be restored? Recipients are regularly abused by malevolent actors masquerading as legitimate brands to send spam, phishing attacks, and virus-laden messages. Mailbox providers are responding to these increasingly sophisticated threats by resorting to more-aggressive filters, restricting default email functionality to text only. Legitimate senders are also subject to the mailbox providers’ policies designed to protect end users, and they can no longer be assured of reasonable delivery, placement, or advanced message functionality.

While there are a number of standards in development around the issue of authentication – technologies that make it possible to know that a message from a given bank really is from that bank – technology standards are only one part of a much larger ecosystem that also involves implementation, policy, and our own expectations of e-mail communications. The needed fix is not just in e-mail technology but also in how e-mail is used by all – senders, mailbox and service providers, and consumers.

What if a trusted class of e-mail could enable mailbox providers to extend privileges to senders? If each sender were accredited, each message they sent would be securely authenticated and the ongoing reputation of the sender carefully monitored so that the mailbox providers could trust those messages. Those senders and messages could be extend privileges such as assured delivery, full functionality, and even a trust icon in the recipient’s view that indicates the messages are safe. A secure system like this could restore privileges that cannot be extended to less secure standard e-mail.

While a trusted class of e-mail would not be appropriate for all bulk senders, we believe a wide variety of commercial and noncommercial senders would capture significant benefits from such a class. Of course not every sender would qualify for trusted-class e-mail, as each sender would have to demonstrate a low spam-complaint rate and strict adherence to established e-mailing best practices. But trusted-class e-mail could yield enormous benefits for legitimate marketers seeking to create and nurture relationships with consumers online. Senders could generate more revenue per e-mail thanks to the combined benefit from higher delivery and enabled links and images. Increased customer satisfaction by users who routinely get the messages they expect to receive would directly result in decreased support costs dealing with nondelivery and phishing attacks. A system that restores trust to e-mail in this way would protect both the marketer’s brand and the customer’s identity.

The opportunity for e-mail to truly grow into the medium we need is upon us. Already with shrinking volumes of real-world messages the transition has begun. Marketers are put on notice: The opportunities for leveraging next-generation trusted-class email services are obvious, as are the benefits to both senders and recipients. It’s time for e-mail to grow up.

John Ouren is senior vice president of sales and business development at Goodmail Systems, which created a certified e-mail service for consumers and businesses.