Worldata/WebConnect is expected today to begin offering its Prospect E-Mail List Rental Merge/Purge service, which uses proprietary encryption technology to ensure the safety of the data.
The Boca Raton, FL, company began testing the service in November with some of the largest e-mail list vendors.
“In the e-mail environment, list providers don't like to send their lists to anyone because of security reasons,” said Jay Schwedelson, Worldata/WebConnect's corporate vice president. He said the company's encryption technology eliminates that risk.
Schwedelson said the company developed an encryption scheme that is “fairly intelligent but not complicated.” List owners send their lists to Worldata/WebConnect with every other character removed from the address, rather than sending the full name and address. For example, [email protected] sent to Worldata/WebConnect for cleaning could be sent as “d a @d n w.”
“Every other character is enough information to clean up any duplicates,” he said. “We found that the major list providers who are concerned with privacy issues found this acceptable.”
Schwedelson said the service is being used by more than 30 companies, including NetCreations Inc., Yesmail.com, Focalex and etour.com.
“Pricing for the service is almost identical to postal merge/purge,” Schwedelson said.
