ISP puts first email campaign through controversial Goodmail programme

AOL has run the first email campaign through its Goodmail Certified Email programme, a company spokesman said.

The ISP said that it expects to use the service for additional campaigns within the next few weeks.

Goodmail Certified Email lets email senders bypass AOL's spam filters for a fee, ensuring that messages addressed to AOL subscribers are delivered to their inboxes.
First announced in February, the scheme allows AOL to cut back on the number of messages that have to be scrutinised by its spam filters.

Ultimately this should lead to a higher number of spam messages getting blocked, while cutting back on the number of so-called 'false positives', messages incorrectly marked as spam.

But Goodmail has come under attack from not-for-profit organisations led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

Danny O'Brien, activism coordinator with the EFF, argued that, instead of solving the spam problem, the AOL programme could cause an increase in the number of legitimate messages getting blocked by "spam filters gone wild".

"With AOL's system in place, AOL will be taking money from big companies to skip those filters entirely," he said.

"If ISPs can make money for a premium service that evades their malfunctioning filters, we worry that they won't fix those filters for groups who do not pay."

The EFF and other organisations have launched a campaign asking AOL to abandon its programme.

In response, AOL has pledged to provide qualifying not-for-profit organisations with complimentary access to the programme.

The final details of this compromise are currently being worked out and should be finished within the coming weeks, AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said.
But opening the programme to qualifying organisations does not take away all of O'Brien's concerns, as it still provides an incentive to AOL to tighten its spam filters to drive sales of its guaranteed email delivery programme.