Certified Spam?

Yesterday I had a little exchange with Return Path after I quoted someone's opinion that if you are a good sender, you won't need certification and if you need certification, you're unlikely to pass the permission tests to qualify in the first place! Return Path made a good point that the images do get loaded automatically and then got a bit confusing about how fully permitted campaigns can still get better results with certification but without any clear reason?

Then morning I found Tamara Gielen's post about getting an email that she'd never heard of who is Goodmail Certified?
Oh dear, there may be a chance that Goodmail are too busy getting sued to vet their customers properly or was there just a bag load of money? I'm sure Goodmail did everything they could to ensure that every address had permission though!

If certification will get you better results even with the best deliverability already, what is the difference? Does it bypass personal spam filter training to avoid false positives, are ISPs deliberately harsher on non-certified email's IP and creative, does certification completely write off IP reputation?


Also if you see my comment on Tamara's post - spot the deliberate typo