Goodmail May Affect AOL & Yahoo! Users Negatively
Feb 4th, 2006 by Alex
AOL and Yahoo! have both announced changes in policy that may affect your ability to receive list traffic from this system, at least in an unadulterated form.
A Quick Summary…
AOL (and likely Yahoo! as well) will be transitioning to a paid-sender program, which I have no plans to participate in. There may be an impact to affected users, in their ability to receive mailing list traffic from this system.
What’s Happening…
I run several mailing lists for non-profit organizations, hobbyists and technical folks like myself. While I’m not sending out millions of emails, the system does send quite a few emails every day (many of are AOL and Yahoo! users).
AOL recently announced that they would be phasing out their whitelist in favor of a service run by Goodmail, called CertifiedEmail. The premise is that senders — such as myself — will pay Goodmail for each message that they send to an AOL user, and in return that message will get to bypass some (if not all) anti-spam checks and proceed directly to the user’s inbox. Yahoo! has announced a similar agreement with Goodmail.
Although the cost per message is only a fraction of a cent, the aggregation of those fractions will add up in a hurry when you multiple them by the number of subscribers I send email to. I certainly don’t have that kind of cash on hand. In addition the application fee for CertifiedEmail is several hundred dollars, which is prohibitively expensive. I do not currently charge for any of the mailing list services I provide, nor do I intend to. As a result, I have no intention of applying for the CertifiedEmail program. For senders who don’t pay it is assumed that their messages will still get to the user, although perhaps without images and link. I’m told that this is how it works today, where an AOL user will have to enable the display of the original message.
That’s the assumed behavior. No one knows yet; we won’t until June with AOL implements the system. The bottom line — as mentioned above — is that your ability to receive list traffic from this system may be affected in the future if you use an AOL or Yahoo! account. That being said, I can provide Gmail invitations to anyone who wants one.
A Few Technical Notes
- The paragraphs above have been simplified a bit for general consumption.
- Due to limitations of my provider, I am currently unable to be added to AOL’s whitelist or dynamic sender list.
It’s best to keep users in the loop. Please contact me if you need assistance changing your subscription address or would like an invitation to Gmail.
