John Katsaros

The Passing of GoodMail

It's with great sadness that we learned this week that GoodMail's investors threw in the proverbial towel after investing $45M for creating a trusted class of e-mail which could bypass spam filters and ensure delivery.  GoodMail was early in the war to defeat spam (or in their case to avoid getting caught by spam filters).  Unfortunately they ran into classic business model problems – the people who had the most to gain didn't want to spend the money.  We've often complained that the $1B plus anti-spam market of goods and services isn't really interested in eliminating the causes of spam – in fact they need lots of healthy spammers to prove the usefulness of spam blocking.

Milestones

A couple of interesting company transitions took place recently. E-mail trust guarantor Habeas was acquired by its New York based rival Return Path for an undisclosed amount which now boasts of having 1,500 e-mail sender customers for which Return Path improves e-mail delivery results. That leaves it down to two main players in the e-mail sending space -- Return Path and Goodmail systems -- to battle it out. On another front, Instant Messaging security provider Akonix was quietly acquired by Quest Software also for an undisclosed amount of money. In January, 2006, Symantec acquired IMlogic and eventually bundled IM security functionality with its BrightMail e-mail security products. This leaves FaceTime as the major independent provider with an IM security product family.