Yahoo! and AOL Adopt Pay for Placement Approach to E-mail

David Daniels | October 27, 2005, 11:11 AM

Yahoo! and AOL have announced adoption of Goodmail’s certified e-mail program. The Goodmail paid accreditation program is based on an authentication and a sender reputation scheme that bypasses ISP filters and is identified to the user with an icon indicating that the e-mail comes from a trusted source. Goodmail has stated that the cost for this program will be volume based amounting to a fraction of a penny per message. The Red Cross is the first company to adopt Goodmail certified mail.

The impact and cost of this program is clearly on the senders, many of who are struggling to implement authentication standards (SPF, etc.), which we discussed in this JupiterResearch report on sender accreditation and e-mail delivery. Part of the reason that adoption of the authentication records has been slow is that there hasn't yet been any real incentive or penalty for marketers to use them. The Goodmail solution, although fee based, has a clear benefit as the ISPs will treat this e-mail differently all the way down to the user interface.

It will be interesting to see how the adoption of this program impacts the e-mail value chain as it may have larger implications on how B-to-C marketers select e-mail marketing vendors.