Effective Marketing in the Customer Experience Economy

In a bid to protect its members from e-mail fraud and phishing, and to offer consistency to commercial e-mail senders, AOL will begin implementing Goodmail's cryptographic CertifiedEmail program and phasing out its IP-based Enhanced Whitelist.

As part of its e-mail security practices, AOL blocks the display of images and hyperlinks on most high-volume messages - except if senders are on the AOL Enhanced white list and maintain very low complaint rates. Beginning today, AOL will also allow senders who have undergone accreditation through Goodmail to display images and hyperlinks by default. Goodmail charges accredited companies a fraction of a cent per message sent.
In addition, AOL will add a "trust symbol" to messages sent by Goodmail's CertifiedEmail senders. It will appear in the inbox and the message window, so members will understand that a sender's identity and reputation have been verified.

It is rumoured that Yahoo will follow suit very soon.

Punish the victim, not the crime
There are multitude of ways to ensure increased deliverability to American ISPs. Many of them are free, or part of a service offered by – for instance - ESPs (Email Service Provider). With this initiative AOL and Yahoo are punishing legitimate (permission based) commercial emailers, by directly or indirectly forcing them to pay additional money to ensure delivery. Obviously the full impact of this initiative will not be known for some time, and much depends on whether the (free) white listing offering from both ISPs will receive the same focus in the future.

In my opinion we should put more energy into fighting spammers. According to a stat I read somewhere a couple of years ago, 80% of all spam stems from less than 10 senders. How difficult can it be to close them down?

Fighting spam by punishing the victims is – in my book – not a viable method.