Internet Pioneer Joins Vanquish; A Boost for the Economic Battle Against Spam.

MARLBOROUGH, Mass. -- Internet pioneer Robert Raisch has joined Vanquish and will serve as the company's Chief Software Architect. He will focus on the commercialization of Vanquish's process for eliminating spam and facilitating delivery of legitimate email.

Raisch brings more than 25 years of experience in software development and business entrepreneurship.

"It's like getting Pavarotti to sing at your daughter's wedding," says Vanquish CEO Philip Raymond. "Rob is not only a supreme software developer, he is one of a handful of people who can be credited with helping to define the way the Internet has evolved into the global interactive medium that it is today."

Raisch founded The Internet Company in 1993 which helped create many of the current business models for online publishing, ecommerce and Internet advertising. Earlier in his career he was Chief Technical Architect for Global Network Navigator (GNN), the first Web portal, which was later acquired by America Online.

Raisch has written authoritatively about spam for more than a decade.

"Spam results when a black market for goods and services becomes indistinguishable from legitimate markets," says Raisch. "Filters fail because they attempt to apply technical barriers to an economic phenomenon."

Avoiding the Filter Trap

"Vanquish has crafted a pure economic solution," says Raisch. "One in which incentives align to satisfy all interests - advocates of privacy, commerce, and even the proverbial long lost friend."

The Vanquish system introduces economic logic to the commercial use of email. It creates incentives for email that is desirable and appropriately targeted.

"Filters discriminate against legitimate marketers simply because their messages are sent in bulk," says Mr. Raymond. "Our approach guarantees message delivery - even past filters - for anyone who can demonstrate their email is unlikely to irritate the recipient. We let the individual decide what's relevant."

"It's all about knowing your audience and treating them with respect," adds Raymond.

With Vanquish, senders who do not have a prior relationship with their targeted recipients are incentivized to target their email very carefully and avoid indiscriminate blast mailings. That's because recipients can trigger a financial penalty to the sender if they feel the message is undesired or irrelevant. Although senders are not forced to adopt these practices, those that don't put money at risk have no guarantee that their mail will get past traditional filters that look for spam, bulk mail and other unsolicited mail.

Unlike email postage - a model being pursued by rival startup, Goodmail Systems - Vanquish keeps email free. Even large commercial mailers do not pay a fee for every email they send; they pay only for those that are rejected by individual recipients.

Vanquish is in the final stages of developing an enterprise-level anti-spam platform for ISPs and corporate data centers. Raisch will lead the engineering efforts to complete the product and develop future solutions.

About Vanquish

Based in Marlborough, Mass., and funded by angel investors, Vanquish offers a radically different approach to fighting email spam while avoiding the filtering of desirable mail. The highly-regarded consumer version of VanquishPro desktop software is available for download and purchase at www.vanquish.com. A complete web mail service including Vanquish anti-spam and five mailboxes will be available later this month. Advance subscriptions can be secured at the company's web site.