Debate Rages Over Plan to Let Charities’ Messages Bypass Spam Filters

A new service that AOL and Yahoo say will improve e-mail delivery and bolster recipients’ confidence that the

messages are legitimate has sparked controversy in the nonprofit world.

Some charities are vehemently opposed to the idea of paying for improved delivery of the e-mail messages they send, while others — most notably the American Red Cross — think the service is worth a look.

AOL and Yahoo plan to allow e-mail messages sent by marketers that pay for the Goodmail CertifiedEmail service to bypass the companies’ spam filters and go directly into recipients’ e-mail boxes. In addition, the messages will bear a symbol that Goodmail says will assure recipients that the senders are credible.

“So much of our anti-spam effort has been focused on preventing the bad mail from coming in,” says Charles Stiles, postmaster at AOL. “This is a way for us to go back and bring what we know to be trusted, authenticated e-mail from reputable senders in, and be able to deliver it in such a way that consumers can recognize it easily and know to trust it.”

In March, a coalition of nonprofit groups, political organizations, labor unions, and small businesses started an online petition campaign to protest the plan. The organizations were worried that the plan would exclude senders who cannot afford to pay to guarantee delivery of their e-mail messages.

In response, AOL announced two new delivery options for nonprofit organizations to ensure that their e-mail messages reach supporters.

Under the new program, nonprofit groups that use good e-mail practices would qualify for AOL’s Enhanced White List, a free service that provides delivery of messages in a way that is equivalent to the paid Goodmail program it plans for commercial marketers.

The second delivery option will allow nonprofit organizations to use one of several “third-party e-mail accreditation services” to vouch for the authenticity of their e-mail messages. AOL will pay the sign-up fees for nonprofit groups that use the services. AOL says the companies with which it is negotiating to provide this option do not charge fees for the e-mail messages that accredited organizations then send.

Meanwhile, Goodmail has said it will not charge nonprofit groups for messages sent in 2006, and the company announced heavily discounted prices that will go into effect for charities next year. The per-message fee is 1/25th of a cent, compared with the one-fourth of a cent to one cent commercial marketers will be charged.

Annual fees based on the number of messages sent will also be available. For example, a nonprofit organization that sends out 100,000 to 500,000 e-mail messages per year would pay $250, while the cost to a group that sends 5 million to 10 million messages a year would be $4,000.

‘Good Guys and Bad Guys’

But the price breaks for nonprofit organizations have not quelled all the opposition.

“The idea of nonprofits’ paying for the right to deliver free communication is appalling,” says Joli Golden, a senior director at United Jewish Communities, in New York. “If you have people opted into your list, I think you should be able to deliver that e-mail for free.”

Madeline Stanionis, president of Donordigital, a consulting company in San Francisco that provides online fund-raising advice, worries that small charities will have a difficult time qualifying for AOL’s delivery program.

“In order to be free, you have to work with a vendor that knows how to navigate the system and helps the nonprofits do that, but that is expensive,” she says. “So, for example, if a nonprofit wants to use a small program that their nephew put together, they might not be able to get their e-mails through because they can’t jump through the right hoops.”

Another fund-raising consultant, Jeff Patrick, president of Common Knowledge, in San Francisco, agrees with AOL that there’s a problem. “The free e-mail system that’s developed over the last 10 or 15 years is free to both good guys and bad guys,” he says. “Along the way we’ve kind of agreed on some rules, but it turns out the bad guys ignore those rules.”

But he says he’s not sure why the senders are expected to pay to fix the system.

Having been the target of some of those “bad guys,” the Red Cross has decided that the Goodmail service is worth trying.

“Our stakes are high,” says Tish Mokrzycki, the organization’s manager for online fund raising. She says that the charity’s supporters read about fraudulent e-mail appeals sent by people posing as the Red Cross — sometimes in an attempt to commit identity theft — and are then afraid to open the legitimate messages that the organization sends.

A Test Case

For the next year, the Red Cross plans to send certified e-mail messages to half of its supporters whose e-mail providers participate in the Goodmail program. The other half will receive standard e-mail messages. Then, at the end of the year, the Red Cross will be able to compare responses to those two types of messages. It says it plans to make its findings public.

How the Red Cross experiment plays out will help determine how important certified e-mail becomes in the nonprofit world, says Bill Pease, chief technology officer at GetActive Software, a company in Berkeley, Calif., that sells online fund-raising software.

“If, after a year’s worth of experimentation with this, we have results from Red Cross or others that say we get a tenfold higher click-through and donation rate if it’s a trust-stamped e-mail compared to one that isn’t, that’s going to be big news in the nonprofit online fund-raising community,” he says. “If we end up with no significant difference because users don’t trust this any more than normal e-mail, it’ll be bad news for Goodmail.”

Mr. Pease says he believes the service won’t be necessary for most nonprofit organizations. For charities that are unlikely to be targets of “phishing” scams that try to trick recipients into giving up personal information or other online fraud, commercial whitelists, like Return Path and Habeas, already help to assure that legitimate mail gets delivered in much the same way as Goodmail promises to do, he says.

Looking ahead, Mr. Pease thinks nonprofit groups will continue to face e-mail delivery challenges as the flow of spam continues unabated. One new development he is tracking: Certification services and e-mail providers are starting to crack down on tell-a-friend e-mail messages.

He says that while an e-mail provider will accept e-mail messages from the Humane Society of the United States because the organization is certified, messages that supporters send to others from the charity’s site are likely to be subjected to the same spam filters as other uncertified mail.

“It’s not the end of the world,” says Mr. Pease. But he believes it’s an emerging trend to watch because “the growth of many organizations’ online lists is in many respects by viral marketing efforts by their supporters.”