• by Shankar Gupta , March 15, 2006

The non-profit advocacy group Center for Democracy & Technology Tuesday came out in favor of AOL's plan to offer e-mail marketers guaranteed delivery of "certified" e-mail, for a fee.

AOL unveiled the controversial plan last month, saying it would ensure delivery--with links enabled and images intact--to marketers certified by Goodmail, which charges a per-message fee. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, along with organizations like MoveOn.org, Craigslist, and the AFL-CIO, joined to oppose the move, claiming that the deal gave AOL a financial incentive to wrongly filter out legitimate e-mail as spam, in the hopes that more senders would use the paid service.

But the CDT argues that AOL's deal with Goodmail deal will not have a negative impact on e-mail communications, assuming that AOL does not allow its anti-spam whitelist program to degrade. "So long as the whitelists remain robust and intact, legitimate bulk mailers that opt not to participate in the certified mail program should see no degradation in e-mail deliverability," stated the CDT.

The CDT also stated that the AOL-Goodmail e-mail certification deal will help shore up eroding consumer confidence in e-mail. "The rise of phishing and other dangerous Internet scams is measurably eroding the trust that users have in e-mail and Internet communication," the CDT stated. "Left unchecked, the decline in user confidence will deal a far worse blow to Internet communication than will any degradation of e-mail delivery. When people don't trust their e-mail, the medium becomes useless as a tool for discourse, as well as commerce."