Goodmail: A Guide To Extortion

If you are the type of person that is constantly looking for a way to con millions of dollars from thousands of reputable and ethical businesses, consider modeling your methods after Richard Gingras, Founder & CEO of Goodmail Systems. His company's CertifiedEmail service provides a method for, what else, companies to legally spam your inbox by paying to ensure their exclusion from spam filters.

Before I rip Mr. Gingras a new one, let me explain how this abomination of technology works.

Goodmail Systems has partnered with two of the biggest internet and e-mail service providers in the world, America Online and Yahoo!. Once the system is implemented, companies wishing to receive this certification for their e-mail will have to pay a small fee (a fraction of one cent) for every e-mail they send. When a certified e-mail arrives in your inbox, it will be identified by an icon of blue ribbon next to the subject line.

It is important to mention that this is not a method of spam prevention, and is not publicly advertised as one. In fact, this system provides little benefit to the end-user other than being able to identify companies willing to spend the cash to make sure you see their message.

The recent controversy surrounding the service really highlights the purpose, and vice versa.

Goodmail stands to make, potentially, billions of dollars by convincing companies around the world that getting their e-mail certified through the service is a necessity. However, instead of protecting the end-user from spam and e-mail scams, this actually creates more spam by allowing anybody who signs up for the service to bypass spam filters with whatever content they can dream up.

This whole system essentially amounts to extortion.

But before you start writing angry letters to Mr. Gingras, the attorney general, or your closest congress-person, you should know that Goodmail Systems is not the only company profiting from this. AOL & Yahoo! will be receiving an unknown percentage of revenue for their participation in this scam.

It seems as if Goodmail is just the middle-man, but that doesn't make them any less guilty.

Windows OneCare Live

After Microsoft's launch of a surprisingly successful anti-spyware unit, I thought that they had got their act together, and that maybe, just maybe, greater things would be coming out of Redmond.

I was wrong.

My initial reaction after installing OneCare was the same reaction I had after tearing ligaments in my knee during a high school gym class. It was painful, embarrassing, and I came close to crying like a 6 year old girl.

Installation

Within the first 60 seconds of running OneCare, I had flashbacks of the days when everyone and their brother used ZoneAlarm. Upon rebooting after the install, my system screeched to a halt while the software made sure that my local area connection was, of all things, allowed to connect to my router. This was followed by several prompts to check if I wanted to allow AOL Instant Messenger, Mozilla Firefox, and Mozilla Thunderbird to connect to the internet. All safe and reliable software run on hundreds of millions of systems around the world.

Oddly enough, there was no prompt to make sure I wanted to grant Microsoft's Internet Explorer permission to do the same.

Virus Scan

The first software-recommended action was to start a virus scan, which I hesitantly agreed to. Immediately my 10,000 rpm hard drive was grinding away, and almost 25 minutes later I had a clean bill of health. The significance of posting my hard drive speed is that with both Norton AntiVirus and McAfee Virus Scan, the average in-depth scan takes about 4 minutes.

To test the OneCare virus scanning further, I placed a virus on my desktop, renamed it with a .txt extension for safety purposes, and ran the scan again. McAfee? Check. Norton? You bet! OneCare? It appears it didn't even look at the file.

For some reason it only took 19 minutes the second time, which makes me wonder what kind of caching is going on. Caching is never a good idea when it comes to scanning for viruses, by the way.

Also worth mentioning are the virus scan options, which consist of: On, and Off. You can also manually exclude files that you don't want the software to scan. "How does that help me," you might ask? It doesn't, unless you write viruses.

Tune-Up

The tune-up portion of the OneCare system seems to be implemented nicely, but not without some questionable functionality. The tasks that run include:

1. Hard-drive defragmenting
2. OneCare Virus Scan
3. A Windows Update check
4. Auto-backup (optional)
5. File cleanup (optional)

I would agree that 3 of these are good practice for the average user, and the backup feature would be useful for people with external or secondary drives that fear file corruption or hard- drive failure.

The file cleanup option is intended to clean out things like temporary office and internet files, as well as "unnecessary program installation files," whatever that means. However, I would highly recommend leaving the file cleanup feature turned OFF. Nothing good can come of giving any piece of software no-questions-asked control over deleting files on your hard drive.

Firewall

It looks like the firewall works. But that's the only good thing I can say about it. I can forgive Microsoft for blocking internet access for all applications that aren't their own. I even understand the idea behind this process: that you can't trust the user.

Unfortunately, having a warning window pop-up every time the average Windows idiot runs an application will make them panic and call for help. If you want proof of this, you can answer my phone for a day.

Conclusion

It appears that Microsoft Antispyware will remain a separate application, which will confuse a lot of users thinking that OneCare will take care of everything. There are better packages out there to handle what OneCare does, but it might give the average user a little piece of mind.

At least until their credit card information gets stolen.