Goodmail Launches Domain-Based Whitelist

E-mail certification firm Goodmail Systems announced today it has launched a domain-based whitelist that inbox providers can reference to help them determine whether or not incoming messages are spam.

The move comes as inbox providers such as Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL are reportedly moving toward domain-based reputation monitoring.

Traditionally, e-mailers’ reputations—or their propensity to send unwanted messages—have been assessed for the most part by a combination of three metrics: the number of spam complaints they get, the number of spam traps they hit and the number of unknown users, or nonexistent addresses, they attempt to send mail to.

Lately, ISPs have reportedly been increasingly taking into account how engaged recipients are with a mailer’s messages to determine if the mail is wanted, as well.

An e-mailer’s reputation is akin to a credit score and, like a credit score, a damaged reputation can take time to clean up. Mailers with damaged e-mail reputations can experience significant e-mail delivery troubles.

Currently, most Internet service providers track e-mailers’ reputations by the sending IP addresses, or the numerical designations for the devices sending the messages.

As a result, e-mail service providers have correctly advised their clients to send different types of e-mail from different IPs—for example, marketing messages, which tend to draw higher spam complaint rates, from one IP or set of IPs, and transactional messages, such as shipping confirmations, from another.

Under IP-based reputation monitoring, e-mail coming from the same marketer, but from different IPs, can have different reputations.

Under domain-based reputation monitoring, all authenticated e-mail from a given company has the same reputation.

According to Goodmail, for $399—for non-customers—the firm will assess a company’s domain’s reputation and if the firm passes certain non-spamming criteria, it will earn a place on Goodmail’s domain-based whitelist.

According to Daniel Dreymann, president and co-founder of Goodmail, most of the firm’s current customers already qualify for the domain-based whitelist and will not have to pay extra to be placed on it.

But unlike Goodmail’s CertifiedEmail program, where mailers agree to abide by certain non-spamming standards and pay a fee to ensure their messages arrive intact at participating ISPs, a spot on the firm’s domain-based whitelist does not guarantee delivery. It will help, though, according to Dreymann.

“Being on the domain-based whitelist is certainly better than being unknown to the ISPs,” he said. “But it won’t grant you the privileges that CertifiedEmail will give you. You will, however, get a boost in deliverability just as with any other whitelist.”