Cloudmark ensures you get the email you want; saves billions for consumers, businesses and ISPs
Revolutionary email reputation system protects the
SAN FRANCISCO — Sept. 18, 2003 — Cloudmark™, Inc., the company that has grown the world's largest SpamFighting community to more than 600,000 users and delivered spam-free inboxes to thousands of businesses, today unveiled Cloudmark™ Rating. The breakthrough email reputation system solves the industry-wide problem of false positives, or good email getting caught in spam filters. In the race to stop spam, false positives are crippling email as a viable way to do business. Ferris Research estimates the cost of false positives to businesses could be as high as $3.5 billion. Consumers, legitimate e-mailers and ISPs are all becoming collateral damage in the war against spam.
Cloudmark Rating solves this problem for all affected parties:
- End users always receive critical emails they opted for - from airline confirmations, to favorite newsletters, to bank statements - and are finally provided an automated, safe "Unsubscribe".
- Businesses are now ensured their legitimate communications end up in customers' inboxes, not the spam quarantine abyss.
- ISPs shed the burden of customer complaints and litigation that stem from false positives by extending the "choice" to the end user.
"Maintaining email relationships with users is crucial to our success," said Jim Young, founder and chief technical officer for HotOrNot.com, a picture rating and matchmaking website that sends completely opt-in mailings to millions. "Cloudmark gives us the peace of mind that our mail will always be properly delivered to those who want to receive it, even as users are confronted with ever increasing amounts of spam."
"Although stopping spam is critical, not generating false positives and thereby missing critical emails in the process is actually more important than stopping spam," said Michael Osterman of Osterman Research. "There are several approaches to minimizing false positives, but Cloudmark's approach is one of the best I've seen for both senders and ISPs."
The Cloudmark Rating System is easy to implement and can reach just about everyone, regardless of the anti-spam product they are using. Just like reputation systems have helped distinguish good sellers from bad sellers on eBay or good products from bad products on Amazon, Cloudmark Rating will do the same for email. Now a reputation system for "good" email exists just like Cloudmark SpamNet, the company's consumer and business anti-spam solution, created a reputation system for spam.
"Until now, everyone's been focused on spam, but our spam filtering effectiveness has reached a threshold where the only way we can improve is to identify legitimate email as well," said Karl Jacob, CEO for Cloudmark. "We found other proposed solutions to this problem to be insufficient, so we developed a reputation system that ensures critical emails from businesses land safely in customers' inboxes."
Consumers
- Ensures consumers always receive the email they care about.
- Gives consumers the power to be in control of the email they want to receive. Until now, anti-spam products have been making this determination for them. For example, maybe you want to receive the Books newsletter from Amazon, but not the Movies newsletter. Now you get to decide with one click.
- Provides a safe place for you to unsubscribe from a mailing list you no longer wish to receive. Removes the fear associated with clicking an unsubscribe link and being added to spammer lists.
Businesses
- Ensures delivery of business critical emails and legitimate newsletters to customers.
- Automatically establishes a business or email marketer as a "good" sender based on the content they send. To build consumer trust, a business can post the Cloudmark logo on its website and in its newsletter to let consumers know it is a trustworthy sender of legitimate content.
- Sends businesses feedback to develop the best marketing communication possible in today's spam-filled world. Companies receive reports that include how many people think their newsletter is legitimate and how many think it's spam.
- Register your mailing lists today at http://rating.cloudmark.com. It's a quick and easy two-step registration.
ISPs
- Eases the burden of customer complaints and litigation by automating the complaint and reporting process.
- Requires minimal overhead; as the sender adds additional subscribers to mailing lists, the receiver calculates a fingerprint and there is NO increase to the size of the message.
- Puts consumers in control by allowing them to be the judge of what they want or don't want.
How does it work?
Cloudmark Rating requires minimal effort on the part of the email sender. Businesses signing up for Cloudmark Rating follow this process:
- Register at http://rating.cloudmark.com
- Receive a unique, secret email address and add this email address to their subscriber list.
- From then on, whenever a mail is sent to their mailing list, Cloudmark automatically fingerprints the message and associates their unique mailing list ID with it.
- When the Cloudmark add-in receives the newsletter at the end user or ISP level, it "knows" the email came from this legitimate sender because the marks match.
- If the consumer still doesn't want to get this newsletter, they press the Unsubscribe button in their Outlook toolbar and never receive the newsletter again.
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About Cloudmark
Cloudmark builds messaging security software that protects communications service provider networks and their subscribers against the widest range of messaging threats. Only Cloudmark Security Platform™ delivers instant security and control across diverse messaging environments, enabling communications service providers to create a safe user experience, protect revenue and safeguard their brand, while streamlining infrastructure and reducing operational costs. Cloudmark's patented solutions protect more than 120 tier-one customers worldwide, including AT&T, Verizon, Swisscom, Comcast, Cox and NTT.