You may have seen the announcement over at Laura Atkins’ blog about Yahoo no longer giving preferred delivery to Goodmail certified messages. I’ve got no insight as to why this might be, and have zero opinion about Goodmail anymore.
But I did find this comment from Laura very relevant to something we’re doing at MailChimp:
“Quite frankly, I am unsurprised by this. My impression of Goodmail has always been they never really understood the role of a certifying agency. For any certifying agency to be successful, they must continually monitor certified customers and enforce standards. Goodmail’s initial certification process was fine, but they never seemed to follow through on the monitoring and enforcement.”
That part about how “they must continually monitor”? I can’t blame Goodmail. That’s extremely hard to do! In a way, MailChimp tried to do this sorta thing ourselves…
In late 2008, MailChimp Labs began Project Omnivore. Our goal was to build a massively scalable tool for our abuse team that could predict bad behavior.
The experiment started with an nVidia Tesla supercomputer, then grew to a cluster of Amazon EC2 servers running a genetic optimization program for 2 weeks nonstop, running over 61 trillion email data comparisons.
This article shares some of the results of our experiment, and where the technology is taking us…
Horrible title, I know. Anyway, if you’re seeing your emails get junked more often than usual this year (perhaps in your inbox inspection reports), it’s probably because of this date issue that Laura Atkins talks about here.
I thought this was a nice SPAM related video with a happy, holiday ending.
of course, the comments on youtube are pretty mean.
Viral project with some complex results.
