E-mail’s Strange Bedfellows

David Daniels | February 28, 2006, 05:00 PM

What do the Gun Owners of America and Moveon.org Civic Action have in common? They along with many other groups signed an open letter to AOL protesting Goodmail’s Certified E-mail offering. What people are missing here, even in the NY Times article this morning, is that this is not a mandatory fee or “tax” as some are referring to it as. It is an optional offering, one that is particularly well suited for transactional mailings or even promotional mailings that are susceptible to scams, such as the well-publicized phishing scams that plagued the RedCross after Hurricane Katrina. This reason is one of the primary drivers to why the RedCross is a charter subscriber to Goodmail offering. So lets be clear, it is not a tax – the Internet is still free and simple – as in Simple Mail Transfer Protocol – so simple that it can spoofed, exploited and so on, the very reason that this optional layer of protection may be appropriate for some mailings – transactional or otherwise.

Similar to the odd combination of people banding together for this cause are the odd mix of organizations banding together to fight the state registries, which this story points out. Unlike the letter to AOL, as I have mentioned previously, the actions being taken to derail the state registries are justified and lets hope successful.

What is however very ironic to me about all of this chatter and gnashing of teeth, is the marketers overwhelming focus on driving down the cost email – a medium which has largely been priced under its true value. So if email is so precious to everyone, then why aren’t more companies enlisting tactics such as targeting, testing and personalization ... the answer that I get from our surveys ... it costs too much. Email and The Perception of Value, strange bedfellows indeed!