Who is Goodmail good for?

Goodmail recently announced that they have enrolled Comcast, Road Runner and Verizon Communications in its CertifiedEmail program. They also have standing deals with AOL and Yahoo!

Here's the short of it:

Email senders pay money to Goodmail, which in turn assures them their messages won't get blocked by the previously mentioned companies' email servers. Goodmail presumably then passes on a portion of the cash to the email provider.

All other email would be passed through the standard barrage of methods for blocking email spam before being delivered to users. Messages which come from senders vetted by GoodMail basically get an express-pass ticket to your inbox.

While I like the notion of certain types of electronic postage, I can't really get behind this idea.

What concerns me is the incentives it provides to those who run the email servers. Server operators hate spam because it costs them money. How would they feel about spam or other commercial messages that pay? Most spammers will simply refuse to pay up. However, some kinds of highly profitable spam may be worth the cost to the sender; especially if they knew their messages would at least be received.

While Goodmail has policies to help minimize the risk of this, there's always fair question as to how well they will be followed or how strictly they'll be interpreted. I suspect any commercial email delivered via Goodmail would be highbrow and legal, but that doesn't always mean wanted.

While service providers can certainly make claims about the behavior of their own webmail clients, it's unclear how they can make their, "100% assured delivery" guarantee regarding all email users. End-users would presumably still have control over any Microsoft Outlook spam blockers they had setup. Any other email security software they had running would also hopefully continue to work and block anything that it saw as concerning.

I also can't help but be concerned when so much electronic postage for so many users would be passing through the hands of a single company. I'd much rather see an open standard for electronic postage which either dealt in computational time, or at least the funds were transfered directly to the recipient somehow.

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