GovDelivery, a government-to-citizen e-mail services firm, has teamed up with e-mail services firm Goodmail Systems Inc. to send CertifiedEmail to citizens in a move to build trust.
Spam that is allegedly sent from government agencies has been on the rise in recent months. As a result, e-mail that is sent by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the US Centers for Disease Control and the US Department of Labor, along with 145 other federal, state and local government entities, will now be identified with the insurance of the CertifiedEmail logo.
“The government has a trusted name and citizens tend to open e-mail from agencies like the FBI and the IRS, so phishers and malicious mailers have been taking advantage of this trust by sending spam e-mail from fake dot-gov addresses,” said Scott Burns, co-founder/CEO of GovDelivery, Saint Paul, MN. “By using CertifiedEmail we take the powerful medium of e-mail and make it more powerful because we’ve added this trust.”
Goodmail’s CertifiedEmail lets legitimate commercial and nonprofit e-mailers send messages to existing customers and users who specifically opted in to receive messages with an industry-trusted authentication mark, a blue-ribbon envelope icon, so that recipients can distinguish the legitimate mail from spam.
CertifiedEmail is supported by seven of the leading North American mailbox providers, including AOL, Comcast, Cox Communications, Time Warner Cable’s Roadrunner, Verizon and Yahoo.
E-mails educating citizens about the CertifiedEmail will be sent out in the first phase of mailing to familiarize citizens with the service.
“The problem in a lack of trust in e-mail extends across all verticals and really exists in government, since the communications tend to be of personal importance,” said David Atlas, vice president of marketing at Goodmail, Mountain View, CA.
