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TRUSTe Taps Mailshell to Expand Monitoring
of Licensee Privacy Practices
Mailshell.com Becomes Professional Contributor
to TRUSTe Privacy Seal Program
SAN JOSE, CA - April 3, 2001 - TRUSTe, the
leading privacy seal program, today announced that it has
partnered with Mailshell.com, the free service that prevents
junk email, to help TRUSTe in its ongoing oversight of licensee
privacy practices. By working with Mailshell's commercial
email management service, TRUSTe will continue to monitor
the adherence of its licensees to posted privacy policies.
As part of its seal program's ongoing compliance and oversight
functions, TRUSTe continuously monitors for adherence to
privacy policies by anonymously "seeding" the email marketing
lists of its licensees. TRUSTe will immediately begin to
work with Mailshell's commercial email management service
to streamline the seeding process, thereby more efficiently
monitoring licensees' commercial email practices, list rental
practices and compliance with unsubscription requests.
Using Mailshell's patent-pending technology, TRUSTe will
seed its licensee list with a unique and anonymous email
identity, enabling TRUSTe to monitor each list's activity
individually, without revealing its identity to the licensee
unless it chooses to do so. TRUSTe will be able to determine
if any licensees resell or market their email lists without
users' permission or in violation of stated privacy policies.
"When it comes to commercial email, consumers should feel
assured that when a Web site posts the TRUSTe seal, it will
keep to the policies articulated in its privacy statement,"
said Bob Lewin, President and CEO of TRUSTe. "We selected
Mailshell to help us in our oversight because its technology
provides the most comprehensive technical solution to junk
email and spam."
Through the partnership, TRUSTe will leverage Mailshell's
core technology, which integrates a comprehensive database
of more than 100,000 unique commercial email senders with
recipients' email client, providing the first intelligent
'Caller ID' for commercial email. Mailshell's functionality
will enable TRUSTe to easily calculate the frequency of
each mailing, maintain an automated archive of all emails
sent by each licensee and monitor compliance with unsubscribe
requests. By using unique, fully functioning email addresses
for each list, TRUSTe can also forward or reply to any email
received via this program.
"Giving out your email address can be risky," said Tonny
Yu, CEO of Mailshell. "Anyone who has your email address
can email you anything that they want at any time and for
any reason. You forfeit some of your privacy when you give
out your email address to sign-up, opt-in, register, subscribe,
personalize or buy."
"Our system will now enable TRUSTe to understand more
about the source and content of each email than ever before,"
added Yu. "Mailshell's Caller ID for email manages, monitors
and hierarchically sorts and delivers email, ensuring greater
privacy and control for email recipients, allowing them
to permanently cancel any undesired email relationship at
any time."
About TRUSTe
TRUSTe, the leading privacy seal program, is an independent
organization dedicated to building consumer trust and confidence
in the Internet. The TRUSTe coalition of participating companies
includes America Online, Excite@Home, Intel, Intuit and
Microsoft.
Founded in 1997, TRUSTe is the premier privacy seal program
worldwide. The TRUSTe seal is currently displayed on all
of the Internet's portal sites and has been rated by Cheskin
Research as the most trust-invoking seal online. Since the
summer of 1999, Nielsen//NetRatings has continuously rated
TRUSTe as the most visible symbol on the Internet. Today,
the TRUSTe maintains the largest privacy seal program with
nearly 2,000 Web sites certified throughout the world.
TRUSTe is based in San Jose, CA, with an office in Washington,
DC. To learn more about protecting your privacy online,
visit the TRUSTe Web site at http://www.truste.org.
About Mailshell
Mailshell's patent pending technology (http://www.mailshell.com),
which was recently cited by The Wall Street Journal as among
"the best ways to organize your email" and "the best ways
to stop spam", acts as an email address escrow service to
prevent junk email. Mailshell users can find and subscribe
to more than 100,000 free services, easily manage commercial
email and take control of unsolicited email and spam. Mailshell
allows users to subscribe safely by providing reviews and
samples of the best email lists so that people are properly
informed before they give out their email address, protect
privacy via a series of transparent and private email addresses
- 'mail shells' - that only reveal what the user explicitly
has given permission to reveal and take control via Mailshell's
advanced filtering technology allowing users to instantly
and permanently stop any email they do not want.
In an effort to promote a sustainable infrastructure for
commercial email, Mailshell created and advocates ten 'mailrights'
designed to balance the needs of email users and marketers.
For more information see http://mailrights.mailshell.com.
Mailshell was founded in January of 1999 and is based
in Santa Clara, CA. Mailshell is a proud member of TRUSTe.
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Contact:
Stefan Pollack, The Pollack PR Marketing Group, (310) 556-4443, spollack@ppmgcorp.com
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