NYTimes.com Reports on the plans by Yahoo! and AOL to introduce a Certified eMail program through GoodMail. The eMail Stamps will cost eMail Marketers between 1/4 and 1 cent US per eMail delivered, with smaller companies with less operating cash will bear the brunt of the higher fees and the big opperator will enjoy a significant (as much as 75%) advantage.

While they say the whitelists will remain in play, they essentially are creating a tiered effect with email.

Paying senders will be assured that their messages will be delivered to AOL users’ main in-boxes and marked as “AOL Certified E-Mail.” Unpaid messages will be subject to AOL’s spam-filtering process, which diverts suspicious messages to a special spam folder. Most of these messages will also not be displayed with their original images and links.

So even if you don’t pay, your eMail Marketing Messages will get through, so long as they pass the filters, but the differences will be vast.

• Those who pay will be AOL “certified” and by extension, those who do not pay are not certified and thus by inference suspect.
• In order to avoid spam filters many who do not pay will continue to use gram.metical trick’ery to try to get their em@il message`s through the filters. The better (read pony’s up) class will ofcourse be able to write their messages as they wish.
• Most telling is the warning that your images and original links will not appear in your mail messages.

I’m not sure about you but if I send an email and it’s links are all stripped out that’s pretty much the same as not having sent the email at all. What about an order fulfilment that contains a link for the product the customer ordered? If it isn’t there, and your email is already suspect for not being “AOL Certified” what’s that going to do to your chargeback rates?

Meanwhile, they claim that this must be done to stop the flow of spam, and yet…

But in recent years the volume of spam has leveled off, in part because of a new federal law that imposes penalties for many deceptive e-mail practices. Moreover, most major e-mail providers have built sophisticated filters that divert much of the spam. AOL says that spam complaints from its members are down 75 percent since their peak in 2003. (These filters also capture about 20 percent of legitimate mail, according to Ferris Research.)

So which is it? I guess the fact is that there is still a lot of it, but they claim in their advertising to recruit new members that they eliminate spam with their filters. If they’re not lieing to their customers, then why the need for a certified email sender program.

Could it be the 80% kickback that GoodMail offered them? Yep. Millions of dollars a month potential. Just follow the money trail.

I think it’s about time for me to seriously consider just not accepting AOL and Yahoo! eMail addresses.

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Dane Morgan wrote this in the wee hours: