TRUSTe, a privacy seal program, has partnered with Mailshell.com, a 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, can manage, monitor and hierarchically sort and deliver email, ensuring greater privacy and control for email recipients, allowing them to permanently cancel any undesired email relationship at any time."