AOL Phases Out Enhanced Whitelist, Moves to Certified Email

David Daniels | January 30, 2006, 10:37 AM

Over the next five months AOL will phase out its enhanced white listing program and will shortly begin implementing Goodmail’s certified email. When the original partnership was announced in October, I speculated that this might have longer term impact on the “email value chain” impacting the way marketers implement email marketing applications, as ultimately the ability to have an ESP get the attention AOL and other large ISPs attention will diminish in importance. Still there are many reasons to work with an ESP, but this changes the economics of email and that impact on the market will take some time to unfold.

In the 2004 report Overcoming the Spam Effect I predicted that third party reputation programs would replace enhanced white lists and that marketers would assume the cost of these reputation services.

The use of Goodmail’s certified mail is a positive step forward for several reasons.
· It removes any perception of a conflict of interest for the ISP’s as it totally removes them from the certification process.
· It standardizes the certification, accreditation and reputation process, which potentially can be used universally across ISPs and MTAs (to date AOL, Yahoo, Port25 and Strongmail are on board as well as a handful of ESPs).
· Most importantly it will accelerate the rate at which marketers improve their level of sophistication. Adding an additional cost to email delivery will drive the industry as a whole to adopt better mailing practices, such as throttling down the frequency of mailing to the non-responding portion of a list. Marketers will have to be more judicious about what they are mailing, to whom, and how often.
· Finally, it begins to restore confidence in the channel for consumers. ISPs will have a much better handle on separating the “good mail” from the bad, which will result in a cleaner, more intelligible inbox for consumers.

For those interested in the details, AOL’s time line for phasing out the Enhanced Whitelist is as follows.

· On April 3, 2006, AOL will change the qualification criteria for the Enhanced Whitelist by lowering the complaint threshold to an extent that will significantly reduce the number of IP addresses included in the program.
· On June 30, 2006, AOL will terminate Enhanced Whitelist privileges. This change will disable links and images by default from all non-certified bulk email viewed from AOL 9.0, AOL webmail and all subsequent client releases. As always, links and images can be enabled by the end user on a message-by-message basis.