Dear Brad (and Fred),

1. We’ve known each other for a decade.
2. You know I’m trying to start a dialogue between your portfolio company, Return Path, and AOL.
3. You know we are not letting spammers buy AOL email addresses–that’s absurd! The truth is we picked another company and their processs over your company and their process–we didn’t sell out our users. Far from it, we’re trying to help protect user inboxes as we always have.
4. We are keeping the AOL Whitelist in place. See the official comment here: “AOL will always maintain some form of an email whitelist that we control, and we will not require anyone to pay for delivery.”

So, Brad, when you run a headline that says “Has AOL Just Endorsed Paid Spam?” you know you’re not being honest. You know for a fact we don’t endorse spam–we’re a leader in fighting spam and have been since day one!

Brad, you also know for a fact that GoodMail only lets folks who *already* have permission to pay to make sure their email gets through to users who have opted in. This takes a huge burdon off of AOL of having to manage billions of incoming messages a month. Does your portfolio company Return Path have a better program? I’m not sure if their monthly subscription (that you keep all the revenue from) is better than the fraction of penny paid per email paid GoodMail (that we share in). However, it is certainly something we can discuss.

In closing, if you want me to try and bring folks to the table you could help me by not printing dishonest headlines about *my* company.

Best Regards,

Jason