FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Subscribe To Email Newsletters With Confidence, Says Study: 99.6% of Online Organizations Honor Email Privacy

TUCSON, Ariz – (July 14, 2004) - Subscribing to email newsletters is remarkably safe in terms of avoiding spam risk, says a new study authored by anti-spam advocate Mike Adams, author of SpamAnatomy (www.SpamAnatomy.com) and president of Arial Software.

The new study, called "2004 Email Subscription Spam Risk Audit," secretly audited the email subscription and handling practices of 1,057 prominent online organizations, monitoring their email behavior towards consumers for six months. The results are published in a downloadable report available in both PDF and HTML formats at http://www.ArialSoftware.com .

The report found that only three out of 1,057 online organizations sent blatant spam while refusing to honor unsubscribe requests. The other 99.6% of organizations honored their email privacy policies and did not share emails with third parties.

"From the results of this study we must conclude that email newsletter subscriptions are almost never the source of spam," explains report architect Mike Adams. Spam primarily comes from web-based email harvesting by software robots, says Adams, not from signing up for email alerts or newsletters.

There were other significant problems with current email marketing practices discovered by the study, however.

Nearly two percent of the surveyed organizations ignored unsubscribe requests, and a shocking 51% failed to include any unsubscribe links at all. Both behaviors are in violation of the federal 2003 CAN-SPAM Act. Yet, even with these failures, actual spam email received was virtually non-existent, and email volume remained low.

"Our conclusion is that consumers can subscribe to email newsletters with confidence that their information will not be shared," Adams said.

The 2004 Email Subscription Spam Risk Audit is available for downloading or viewing at http://www.ArialSoftware.com.

About Arial Software

Founded in 1993, Arial Software is widely considered the leading industry pioneer in permission email marketing software. The company’s products are used by thousands of businesses, non-profits, associations and other groups to compose and send email newsletters and personalized messages directly to subscribers, customers, prospects and members.

Arial Software’s mission is to be a universal provider of software tools to automate, personalize and measure meaningful B2C communications. Company information can be found at the Arial Software Press Center, http://www.arialsoftware.com/presscenter.htm

Contact: Steve Delgado, Media Relations, 1-520-615-1954, ext. 15.