StrongMail Systems Announces Broad Support for Evolving Anti-Spam Standards

Enables Legitimate Senders to Keep Pace

Redwood Shores, CA — November 5, 2004 -- StrongMail Systems, provider of the world’s first Business Messaging Server, today announced a comprehensive plan to support Yahoo DomainKeys, Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Sender ID and future signing authentication standards. StrongMail will make each of these authentication standards available to its customers across the globe through the StrongMail Business Messaging Server, ensuring that their customers stay up-to-date with the rapidly evolving email landscape.

DomainKeys, SPF, and Sender ID differ in technical specification but share the end-goal of minimizing the forgery of email messages. DomainKeys is a cryptographic-based authentication technology developed by Yahoo, in which signatures are inserted into every message allowing receivers to verify the original sender and guarantee that the message’s content has not been altered while in transmission.

Sender ID and SPF are IP-based authentication methods which verify that every email is truly from the Internet domain from which it claims to have been sent. This is done by checking the address of the server sending the mail against a registered list of servers that the domain owner has allowed email to be sent from. This makes it easy to stop most forged "From" addresses in email, helping to counter simple spoofing to complex phishing attacks.

Additionally, new approaches continue to emerge, such as Cisco Identified Internet Mail, another cryptographic technique, which StrongMail Systems also plans to support.

"As a service provider, our company, mobileStorm, needs to ensure that we provide our customers early access to the very latest in authentication technology to safe-guard their brands and reputation as legitimate senders," said Jared Reitzen, CEO of mobileStorm, a B2B application service provider who sends over 30 million emails per month. "We are pleased to have chosen StrongMail for our foundation as they have taken a proactive and pragmatic approach in addressing our needs for this emerging technology."

In general, the impact of spam has grown beyond a user inconvenience to having a direct impact on business’s ability to ensure delivery of their email communications. This comes at a time when many customers, employees, and partners are seeing increasing value in the convenience of email and are requesting it as a primary method of contact. The result is that it is increasingly incumbent upon businesses to ensure email delivery. Ultimately, complying with anti-spam authentication standards may not just be for improved delivery, but may be mandatory for non-junk communications.

"Fraudulent email practices have impacted the value of this highly cost-effective communication channel to the customer. We are working closely with other industry leaders to mold new standards in an effort to increase the level of sender accountability and reverse this trend," said Frank Addante, CEO of StrongMail Systems. "As our name implies, we are strongly committed to the adoption of technologies for delivery of legitimate email, ultimately protecting the user and our customers."

About StrongMail Systems, Inc.
StrongMail Systems has pioneered the world’s first Business Messaging Server, an application server for electronic messaging. With it, enterprises and service providers can produce and operate streamlined email applications to rapidly communicate with their customers, employees and partners. Fortune 500 companies such as Ticketmaster, Fox Sports, & ClearChannel Communications are putting the power of electronic communications into the hands of their business users with StrongMail Systems. StrongMail Systems is privately held and funded by Sequoia Capital and Evercore Ventures. The Company is headquartered in Redwood Shores, CA.