$45M in VC funding later, Goodmail Systems shuts down(paidcontent.org)
paidcontent.org
$45M in VC funding later, Goodmail Systems shuts down
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-e-mail-certification-startup-goodmail-systems-shuts-down/
8 comments
How ironic that the /. link you posted is blocked by my corporate sonicwall...
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.
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.
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.
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.
More detail here: https://www.fis.dowjones.com/WebBlogs.aspx?aid=DJFVW00020110...
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.
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.
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.
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.