I read an article today about major US ISPs which are signing up for GoodMail.

Goodmail offers CertifiedEmail which according to their website does the following:

The Certified Email™ Solution
What is CertifiedEmail?
CertifiedEmail is a premium delivery option for qualifying senders that positively affects email marketing metrics. Once you have been accepted into the program, your marketing and transactional messages become trusted-class email at participating ISPs. Since they know that your email is authentic and comes from a verified sender, these ISPs convey special privileges.

100% Assured Delivery
Spam filters inadvertently send up to 20% of your permission email into junk folders. In contrast, CertifiedEmail is routed automatically to the inbox, past content and volume filters. You get 100% of your email delivered.

Links and Images Rendered by Default
Nearly all ISPs today disable links and images on default as a protection against phishing. CertifiedEmail messages are presented with all images intact and links working. Users can’t respond if they don’t see your email. With CertifiedEmail, they’ll see it.

Special Blue Ribbon Envelope Icon
ISPs specially mark all CertifiedEmail messages with a blue ribbon envelope icon, which tells consumers that your message can be trusted and is safe to respond to. The email you send as CertifiedEmail is visually differentiated from other volume messages. CertifiedEmail is marked with a blue ribbon envelope in your inbox. When you open a CertifiedEmail, you’ll see the blue ribbon envelope icon again – just outside the body of the email message.

It is troubling that large ISPs like Verizon, At&T, AOL and Yahoo are falling for this marketing nonsense. Much of the same arguments are valid against this technology as I mentioned in a previous post about Domain Keys.

Even worse in this technology are the 100% delivery guarantee and the guarantee that images are displayed in the e-mail client. Of course these are handy guarantees if you are a legit mass mailer but two major problems pop up in my mind.

A promise of 100% delivery guarantee is something no one can ever make good. The reason for this is that the sender does not control the final destination (my mail client/mail server). If the receiver has a spam system which does not care about GoodMail, then it falls back on the usual spam detection filters. I wonder how GoodMail’s legit mass mailers will react when they see that the 100% they bought isn’t really what they thought it would be. The same goes for the displaying of images. You cannot guarantee that if you don’t control the end point.

The other problem is the scary thought that some of the CertfiedEmail senders might get owned by a spammer and become zombie hosts in the spammer’s botnets. In this scenario, the spammer will be able to send out CertifiedEmail by using the zombies as a relay point. This would be great from the spammer’s point of view because much of the spam filters get bypassed.

Still not a good solution for the spam issue, it seems.