RPost.com Debuts Registered Email™ service

APRIL 5, 2000 – LOS ANGELES, CA – RPost.com Inc. will preview the industry’s first Registered Email™ delivery service at the “e-mail center” at Internet World. “Very often for businesses, and even individuals, just sending off an e-mail isn’t enough,” explains Terrance Tomkow, President and Chief Technology Officer of RPost.com Inc. “FedEx, UPS, the US Postal Service and just about every other major delivery service has known this for decades, which is why they offer delivery confirmation services like registered mail. But for the most part, that hasn’t been an option with e-mail services. When over one trillion e-mails were sent in 1999, we decided to do something about that.”

The RPost service time stamps and authenticates the contents and attachments of email with a digital fingerprint, while providing third party verification that the email was sent and delivered to the recipient’s mail server.

That digital fingerprint technology uses the same Secure Hash Standard used by the National Security Agency branch of the US Government. This technology is widely considered by cryptography specialists to be one of the most secure available and is used by RPost to verify that neither the e-mail itself, nor any attachments had been altered in any way prior to delivery.

Although RPost will not formally launch until May 1, users may try out the service by either going to the company’s web site, www.RPost.com and sending e-mail from there or by adding mail@RPost.com to the list of cc: recipients on outgoing mail.

Once a piece of e-mail goes through RPost’s mail server, the proprietary, patent-pending system returns a delivery receipt to the user, containing verification information such as time, email contents, and a digital fingerprint. RPost uses this fingerprint to authenticate the email if there is ever a question. If the recipient allows, RPost also confirms that the email has been opened.

The company, which is scheduled to go public in April, expects to generate its primary revenues as a value-added e-mail service for web-based e-mail services, e-commerce sites, corporate mail servers and ISPs who sign up to use RPost as an outsourced mail server.