On April 18, 2006 CheetahMail's Privacy & Compliance Leader, Ben Isaacson interviewed AOL's Postmaster of three years Charles Stiles live at the ESPC Email Deliverability Bootcamp in Chicago, IL. In advance of that session, Ben connected with Charles to preview for CheetahSpots readers some of the pressing deliverability issues he faces as AOL's Postmaster.

BI: Last year, AOL issued a release saying there is now less spam in user inboxes than the year prior. Does that mean your job is getting easier? Are spammers really on the run?

Not at all. It's actually getting much harder. Differentiating between legitimate email and spam is very complex and there are more and more processes and increasing chances of error. We don't consider that there's any room for error, not even for one legitimate email so we keep trying to find more ways to get the good email through. [AOL receives more than four billion email messages per day!]

BI: Can you give an estimate of the percentage of senders/IP's who are on the regular WL and are also on the EWL?

Unfortunately, there's no way to determine this number. In order to figure this out, we would have to manually go in to the system, then pull raw data and analyze it, which we typically do not do. We can't help determine EWL status or help put people on the EWL. It also changes all the time and is just an operational tool to provide functionality and make sure we're getting the right types of messages through and not filter good messages.

BI: Earlier this year, you had mentioned proposed changes to the EWL. My understanding is that some of those changes may still take place. What can you say about these potential changes and why are they occurring?

Actually, all of our filtering systems are in constant refinement. We will still be making some EWL changes and close some of the loopholes. And to re-iterate, the regular whitelist will never go away. Any changes we make to the EWL will be minor and only will be in keeping with what we're trying to do; achieve delivery. Standards for EWL status may change a bit, but quite frankly; nobody should expect huge, drastic changes.

BI: Since our webinar together a month ago covered the topic of your adoption of Goodmail Systems, I have one follow up question; when are you going to start identifying Goodmail Certified Email messages in the AOL interface?

We do not have a specific date, but it will happen in the first part of this month.

BI: In addition to Goodmail, are you considering adoption of other third party accreditation or reputation service providers?

Absolutely. We were considering other service providers prior to the Goodmail announcement. It's very difficult for such a complex system such as ours to make any significant changes. Additional layers of infrastructure are very difficult and time consuming and adding another layer is a nightmare and typically not a benefit to our systems, employees, members or investors. We really want to know what consumers and the marketplace want and we are very responsive to the customer. We fully expect others to enter the marketplace and we've never given exclusivity to Goodmail and want there to be competition in this space. This is an initial trial and we want to see the perception of consumers to this service offering first.

If you have any questions for Ben or Charles please send an email to privacy@cheetahmail.com

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