Goodmail CEO Richard Gingras appears to have employed the Jedi Mind Trick to convince the California Senate that AOL's Goodmail arrangement was never about fighting spam and phishing. One imagines a room reduced to murmurs and page flipping as reporters dig through their notes from February.
Indeed, that was certainly the impression people were given when AOL's public relations nightmare began with a murdok:
"We have an email ecosystem with serious problems," said Gingras. "If you have an open medium, bad actors are going to take advantage of this." CertifiedEmail aims to address those problems.
Gingras estimated the spam and phishing schemes and storage cost AOL in the tens of millions of dollars a year, or an average of $8-12 per mailbox per year.
"What we offer goes far beyond what the EnhancedWhitelist has ever offered. Whitelists can be gamed all the time."
Graham has been vigilant in labeling detractors of AOL's CertifiedEmail implementation as purveyors of propaganda and misinformation, even if the misinformation seem to originate from AOL.
One of those spreading the misinformation Graham spoke of was perhaps MoveOn.org and their petition against the program signed by some 500 businesses, labor groups, non-profits, and citizens. The organization's
It's true that this may indeed be a battle of semantics - a hedge that allows AOL and Goodmail to assert that how statements were interpreted was not the intention of their words.
But like the initial problem of the Phantom Memo, where everyone on God's green earth but AOL interpreted it as a press release, everyone but Goodmail apparently interpreted the service as an antispam service.
Using the "we never said that" defense a second time is wearing a bit thin on those paying close attention, suggesting that the Jedi Mind Trick only works in the movies.
Tag: | document.write("Email murdok here.")
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