• by Shankar Gupta , February 7, 2006

In a move apparently designed to calm jittery e-mail marketers, AOL is backing away from a plan to phase out its enhanced whitelist in favor of Goodmail's CertifiedEmail program within six months. Instead, AOL now says it will use both systems.

Last week, AOL roiled many in the e-mail industry by announcing a deal to start using Goodmail to fight spam. Goodmail charges marketers a fee to send commercial e-mail, but guarantees in-box delivery, HTML rendering, and link activation. The fee likely will be around one-quarter of a cent per e-mail Goodmail's CEO, Richard Gingras, told OnlineMediaDaily Monday; AOL will receive a share of the proceeds, Gingras said.

AOL's enhanced whitelist, by contrast, is a free service. Marketers with good reputations are eligible for the whitelist, and once on it, AOL delivers their e-mails without altering them.

Some e-mail marketers last week indicated that they were unhappy with AOL's plan to use Goodmail, and didn't want to pay extra to ensure their messages would be delivered.

AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said the June 2006 phase-out date for the enhanced whitelist was based on a draft proposal, but the portal now plans to keep the enhanced whitelist indefinitely. "There's been a lot of talk and miasma about the enhanced whitelist. Here's the bottom line: We went into discussions with a lot of people who are stakeholders in the e-mail delivery process; we gave them a working draft about some thoughts we had about the enhanced whitelist," he said. "It was not meant to be a declarative statement. After some internal and external feedback, we believe we've found the right path moving forward."

That path, Graham said, is to continue to maintain the enhanced whitelist "as long as it continues to do a great service to AOL members." He added: "We don't have any plans to phase that out at all."

Trevor Hughes, executive director of the E-mail Sender and Provider Coalition, an e-mail trade association, said AOL's continued commitment to the whitelist moots the controversy. "AOL has changed their position on this, and I think the story's kind of gone, frankly," he said. "What we understand this morning is that the enhanced whitelist will not go away, and the two will exist concurrently ... That suggests that they're broadening the deliverability options for customers, and for those who have been successfully navigating the enhanced whitelist up until now will be able to continue to do so."