Goodmail: CertifiedEmail will not reduce spam

Legislators and advocacy groups were surprised at a California Senate committee hearing last week when Goodmail CEO Richard Gingras said its fee-based CertifiedEmail program that AOL and Yahoo are implementing is not meant to reduce spam.

"That's what I thought was the selling point: that it was going to reduce spam and phishing," said state Sen. Dean Florez, a Democrat who chairs the state Senate Select Committee on E-Commerce, Wireless Technology and Consumer Driven Programming.

Rather than helping to reduce spam Gingras claimed that the point is to allow users to verify who important messages are really from, like a message from your bank or credit card company.