Over the past few days, a couple of industry bloggers have asked whether Goodmail still adheres to the highest standards of sender quality. Frankly, we welcome the question because we’re very proud of the system that we have set up for accrediting senders and monitoring the quality of their campaigns. It’s the best in the industry.
Here are the facts:
1. Goodmail only certifies messages sent by senders with the best sending practices. Our accreditation process ensures quality standards: every sender goes through the industry's most rigorous vetting process before they are admitted into the program. Fewer than 20% of senders that apply for accreditation by Goodmail are actually accepted into the CertifiedEmail program.
2. Goodmail is very responsive to input from its ISP partners. When some of our partners (interestingly, not including Yahoo) raised a concern over the practices of a couple of our CertifiedEmail senders, we responded by immediately suspending, and ultimately eliminating, those senders and further tightening our AUP – which was already the strictest in the industry.
Our current AUP can be found at http://www.goodmailsystems.com/about/policies/acceptable-use-policy.php . Our relationship with our ISP partners is very important to us, it only makes sense that we are attentive to their wishes and concerns.
3. Only Goodmail actively monitors all CertifiedEmail senders in real-time. Traditionally, we have used complaint rates as the primary quality metric because it is objective and directly represents the voice of the consumer receiving CertifiedEmail. In order to retain their privileges, senders have always been required to maintain low complaint scores (under 0.22% complaint rate). We have recently expanded the number of factors that we use to evaluate a sender's reputation. Our real-time dashboards alert us about any quality issues as they happen. If a campaign yields an unacceptably large number of complaints, we suspend that sender immediately. Once in a long while, a sender with a low complaint rate will send emails that don’t pass our “smell” test—if so, we reserve the right to terminate them as well.
4. We enforce the prompt removal from a mailing list of any user who hits the Spam button by monitoring repeat complaints for the same sender/recipient combination. We have a host of additional measures in place, including that all RFC-822-From addresses and all IP addresses must be pre-approved before sending CertifiedEmail.
Still have questions? Please give us a call or send us an email. We’re always happy to share our thinking and to also listen to your thoughts.
Daniel Dreymann
President & Co-Founder, Goodmail Systems