FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Corporate Email Marketing Practices Audited In Sweeping Covert Study by Anti-Spam Advocate

TUCSON, Ariz – (July 21, 2004) - Anti-spam advocate Mike Adams (www.SpamDontBuyIt.org, www.ScreenSpam.org, www.SpamAnatomy.com) wanted to find out whether prominent online organizations tell the truth when they claim to protect your email privacy and honor unsubscribe requests.

After six months of research that tracked and recorded the email marketing practices of 1,057 online organizations (including many Fortune 500 companies), the results are in. Entitled "2004 Email Subscription Spam Risk Audit," the complete report is available at http://www.ArialSoftware.com.

The report found that almost no spam comes from subscribing to email newsletters: only 0.4% of the companies tracked in the study engaged in high-volume email spamming and ignored unsubscribe requests, meaning that 99.6% of organizations don't send spam. But other serious problems were found: 51% failed to include unsubscribe links in their outbound emails, 1.8% failed to properly process unsubscribe requests, and 45% failed to prominently identify the source of emails sent to end users, leaving many email recipients wondering, "Did I subscribe to this?"

The study is the largest of its kind ever conducted, requiring six months and the combined efforts of three part-time researchers. It was sponsored by Arial Software (www.ArialSoftware.com), developers of permission email marketing software. (Study author Mike Adams serves as the president and CEO of Arial Software.)

"The results were surprising," explains Adams. "There is a widespread belief that subscribing to email newsletters results in an endless stream of spam. This research shows that belief to be false."

In effect, the study vindicates the email privacy practices of 99.6% of online organizations while simultaneously revealing the widespread presence of other email marketing failures such as missing unsubscribe links. "Most organizations aren't CAN-SPAM compliant," explains Adams, "but they also aren't spamming."

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