SAN FRANCISCO, CA - September 17, 2003 - The Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy ("ISIPP") announced today that the Email Deliverability Summit II which it sponsored yesterday in San Francisco was a resounding success.

Bringing together the CEOs and other executive decision makers from twenty top ISPs and spam filtering companies such as AOL, MSN, RoadRunner, CloudMark, SpamAssassin, and Ironport, and twenty top email senders including RappDigital Innovyx, SilverPop, YesMail, CheetahMail, and Digital Impact, the Summit was observed to be the first group to bring members of both the email sending and email receiving industries together in a manner which facilitated cooperative problem-solving regarding email deliverability.

"Even though we had more than three times the number of people as at Summit I, the level of focus and cooperation was just as high. It was absolutely incredible," explained Anne P. Mitchell, Esq., CEO and President of the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy, and co-Chair of the Summit.

"The Summit was the most productive event of its sort that I've ever attended," said George Bilbrey, Vice President and General Manager of Deliverability Services for ReturnPath. "It provided both senders and receivers a set of concrete steps they could take to improve the deliverability of the legitimate mail that end users want."

"The Summit was a tremendous success," agreed Kevin George, Vice President of Operations for SilverPop, and one of the organizers of the Summit. "It was a unique opportunity to have many of the brightest minds in the industry together in one room with the common goal of solving the issues of false positives and improving deliverability rates for legitimate e-mail, while helping receiving systems to be able to distinguish good mail from bad in order to help them in their efforts against spam."

Organized by Mitchell, co-Chair Ian Oxman, Vice President of Email Consulting for RappDigital, and George, Summit II carried forward the work of the first Email Deliverability Summit held in July of this year, presenting and recommending new industry standards to both the sending and receiving industries.

"A total of five new industry standards were presented at Summit II," said Mitchell, "and all five received broad support and commitment from those in attendance. Many of those present at the first Summit have already implemented these standards, and many more committed to doing so."

The standards presented at Summit II related to bounce handling, unsubscribe requests, publication of email permissions requirements, and communication between the sending and receiving industries. With respect to the last, ISIPP debuted its new EDDB (Email Deliverability Database), the result of a collaboration among Summit I attendees.

"I think everyone present found out what we realized at the first meeting, that we're all focused on the customer experience, and have far more in common than we thought," said Summit veteran Derek Harding, CTO of RappDigital Innovyx. "For perhaps the first time in history the email senders, spam filter companies and the major ISPs, partners and competitors, rivals and friends, sat at one table and talked honestly and openly about the issues we face and what can be done to address those issues. Not just in a theoretical way but in a practical, "what can we do right now", manner."

Traveling from India to attend the Summit, Suresh Ramasubramanian, Security and Antispam Operations Manager for ISP Outblaze Limited, congratulated ISIPP and all of the Summit attendees "for what turned out to be a highly interesting, frank and open discussion of issues that concern both senders and receivers of email - the issues that will make email remain a usable communication tool, and drag it out of the morass of spam into which it is slowly sinking."

"That was the most energizing meeting I have been to in a long time," added Laura Atkins, CEO of Word to the Wise, a deliverability consultancy to both the sending and receiving industries. "It was amazing to watch the dynamics in the room -- that everyone who was there was able to put aside their corporate competitiveness and work for the good of everyone. And not just everyone in the room, but looking forward and understanding that this impacts everyone -- each group deeply understood that it was the end user, their experience and their mailbox that we were talking about. Everything was focused on making sure they, the end users, have the best possible online experience."

For a detail of the standards presented at Summit II, and information about EDDB, see http://www.isipp.com.

Full text of release which includes additional quotes and list of attendees available here.

About the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy

The Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy (ISIPP) is a privately held corporation headquartered in the heart of California's Silicon Valley. ISIPP's advisors provide expert analysis and consulting services to legislators, governmental and regulatory agencies, industry leaders, educational institutions, and the press. Founded in 2003 and privately funded, ISIPP sponsors such industry policy and working groups as the Email Management Roundtable, and the Email Deliverability Summit, and conferences such as the 2004 Spam and the Law conference. For more information see http://www.isipp.com

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