SANTA CLARA, CA - August 30, 2001 - Mailshell today announced that its breakthrough spam-prevention and email management service (http://www.mailshell.com) this week added its 500,000th registered user, more than 400,000 of whom have registered since January of this year. The company also today unveiled a suite of premium features that simplifies and manages email while preventing junk email and spam.
"We solicit and receive tons of feedback from our users about services they want added to Mailshell," said Tonny Yu, president of Mailshell. "We've attracted a core of web-savvy, passionate and vocal users and it's a tremendous help to get such direct feedback from such a discerning audience. It helps us set priorities and it keeps the bar high for our service."
Mailshell's success is consistent with users' growing frustration over increasing volumes of junk email and spam. Industry estimates indicate that 62.3 billion junk email messages will be sent to U.S. Internet users during this year. Major ISPs are focusing on junk mail this summer: Hotmail recently upgraded its spam-blocking service and Earthlink launched a national advertising campaign focusing on junk email.
Mailshell lets users create a custom email domain (e.g. @username.com) and then use it to create unlimited, disposable email addresses. If any address begins receiving unwanted email the user simply cancels that disposable address. Mailshell forwards email sent to the custom domain to the users' existing email account, allowing users to keep their current email address.
The premium features are packaged and priced at $29.95 during the promotional launch period, offering users several advantages over the basic service including:
Mailshell's patent-pending technology acts like a 'Caller ID' system for email so people can identify, and 'unsubscribe' from, any list, person or company at any time. By creating a unique email identity for each party with whom they do business, Mailshell users can automatically recognize the sender of commercial email. If users don't like what they receive, they can simply unsubscribe by checking a box.
"Among the best ways of preventing junk email is to treat an email address like a credit card number, revealing it rarely and judiciously," added Yu. "Mailshell acts like an email escrow service that does not share the user's private email address with anyone. Instead, it serves as a middleman between users and their various email relationships."
Mailshell was recently dubbed "priceless'' by Forbes magazine and among "the best ways to organize your email'' and "the best ways to stop spam'' by The Wall Street Journal. In an effort to promote a sustainable infrastructure for commercial email, Mailshell created and advocates 10 'mailrights' (http://mailrights.mailshell.com) designed to balance the needs of email users and marketers.
Mailshell was founded in January 1999. The company is based
in Santa Clara, with an additional office in San Francisco.
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