Certified e-mail is an e-mail whitelisting technique by which an internet service provider allows someone to bypass spam filters when sending e-mail messages to its subscribers, in return for paying a fee to the certifying service. A sender can then be sure that his messages have reached their recipients without being blocked, or having links or images stripped out of them, by spam filters. The purpose of certified e-mail is to allow companies to reliably reach their customers by e-mail, while giving recipients certainty that a certified message is legitimate and is not a forged phishing attempt.
AOL asserts that free e-mail on AOL’s service will continue to work as it always has, and a user will continue to receive all messages from a sender whom he has whitelisted. AOL subscribers will not be charged for sending or receiving e-mail, and senders who do not prepay AOL will have their messages subject to the same spam filters as before.
MoveOn organized a protest of AOL’s use of certified e-mail. It characterizes the program as an “e-mail tax”, and claims that AOL is giving spammers a direct route into users’ mailboxes, while attempting to move more people to paid e-mail by causing a larger amount of legitimate unpaid e-mail to be rejected by the spam filters.
CertifiedEmail has been adopted by seven of the top 10 ISPs in the USA: AOL, AT&T, Comcast, Cox, Road Runner, Verizon, and Yahoo.