

$45M in VC funding later, Goodmail Systems shuts down - asanwal
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-e-mail-certification-startup-goodmail-systems-shuts-down/

======
tomwalsham
There's a long running joke response to 'solutions to spam' that's been
running on slashdot since they were giving out 5-digit uids. cf.
[http://www.ninjavspenguin.com/blog/2007/10/01/slashdot-
spam-...](http://www.ninjavspenguin.com/blog/2007/10/01/slashdot-spam-post-
wizard/)

Although totally flippant, and never addressing the specific issues in a post
directly, I've yet to see a thread on /. in over 10 years in which this was
not an appropriate response.

Mail is big-H Hard. Yesterday there was a discussion on the demise of the
self-hosted mailserver, and there's a real reason why MailChimp etc have
become a no-brainer for small-medium enterprise. Trying to run your own
mailserver is increasingly becoming a fools errand.

If you want to hit Yahoo and Gmail, you get a solid reverse DNS, implement SPF
and DKIM and hope that the spec doesn't change under you. Even then you need
to maintain relations with their team if you're sending more than a couple of
hundred emails a day to their platform.

Throttling is arbitrarily switched. 50/second, 10/second, 1000/second.
Unpublished guidelines which change and you need to comply or your server gets
a mysterious 5xx error response which you have to debug. Other error messages
related to mailboxen, existence of accounts etc. all have to be handled and
appropriately applied to addresses in your list. Send too many post-bounce
messages and again the banhammer will be wielded.

If you want to get into AOL Goodmail was one option. For Hotmail you have
'Sender Score' certification which costs an arm and a leg and is completely
useless for small-volume senders.

At any point in these, if some jackass passes anything that hits their
heuristics you have to do a personal contact contact back and forth with the
ISP, and god forbid you encounter human-modified SURBLs. These are terribly
subjective, frequently on vacation, but relied on as gospel by many mid-level
admins in institutions such as universities and mid-level enterprise.

Email is broken. It was fundamentally based on trust in the early days, and
seeing as PGP never (understandably) took off, the whole system is IMO beyond
redemption. What we see now is a growth in systems designed to replace email
as a functional method of trusted communication. Opt-in services like Twitter,
Facebook for interpersonal contact and groupwise style systems intraoffice.

While Gmail has performed admirably to save email's utility for the basic
user, that their systems will never be taken up by certain industries and orgs
(central control issues, incompetence, revenue streams[SenderScore]) means I
think it's well into the long decline we saw with Usenet.

What will emerge, who knows, but I see little hope for the technological
replacement or fix to email which wouldn't in using essentially give up all
central control to once agency, be it Google, Facebook or whoever.

~~~
phlux
How ironic that the /. link you posted is blocked by my corporate sonicwall...

------
garyrichardson
About 3-4 years ago, I was a sysadmin at a marketing company. One of my
primary tasks was making sure our emails got delivered. I've been on both
sides of the coin: sending marketing messages and an every day email user. We
were more or less forced at the time to use Goodmail to get our emails into
AOL.

At the end of the day, marketers are trying to get your attention. They'll do
anything no matter how annoying. For example, flash banner ads.

With that in mind, Goodmail was just another way for marketers to get mail
into your inbox, with an incentive for the ISPs to let it through -- Goodmail
split the senders fees with the ISP's.

They wedged themselves into the industry as middle men. I don't think anyone
outside of email admins and marketers knew anything about Goodmail or their
blue ribbons, especially rural AOL users.

------
ajays
FTA: "CEO Daniel Dreymann tells Venturewire that Goodmail was unable to make a
profit after Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) stopped supporting the system last year."

I was one of those who used to complain to Yahoo bitterly about spam with the
"goodmail seal of approval". Over the years I noticed that the amount of spam
with their seal was increasing, and I had to complain about it. They had a
special deal with Yahoo, and Goodmail's emails had a special blue icon next to
them. But they blew this opportunity for a little quick cash. If Goodmail had
not lowered their standards and let spam through, they might even still be in
business.

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ronnix
More detail here:
[https://www.fis.dowjones.com/WebBlogs.aspx?aid=DJFVW00020110...](https://www.fis.dowjones.com/WebBlogs.aspx?aid=DJFVW00020110219e72m000b5&ProductIDFromApplication=&r=wsjblog&s=djfvw)

------
stoked
I had some discussions with Goodmail late last year about potentially using
their service. We send a decent amount of mail via custom qmail servers. For
us, it was a chicken and egg problem, Goodmail obviously required a maximum
complaint rate but on the flip side higher complaint clients would be the ones
most interested in the service. Our low complaint clients were already hitting
the inbox and Goodmail didn't seem to justify the extra effort and cost to
drive better engagement.

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teyc
Information routes itself around the path of least resistance. In this case,
it is spam filters. Once spam filters get smart enough, then GoodMail loses
its utility or pricing premium.

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jrockway
The people who most want to pay to ensure you receive their email are the
people from whom you least want email. That's the problem.

