Goodmail Partners with Epostmarks, USPS

One of the most irritating printed communications—irritating to me, at least—sent by banks and other financial-services firms are privacy notices.

Every time I get one, I think of the millions of privacy notices banks are forced by law to send every year—letters that only the most privacy-paranoid shut-in would read, and that must cost these firms millions of dollars to send.

Correction: Those letters don’t cost the financial institutions a dime. We pay for them.

That’s why I find them so irritating.

However, Goodmail Systems and Epostmarks today announced what looks to be a solution to this national privacy policy overkill, along with the expense of it and other official communications.

Dubbed PostmarkedEmail, Goodmail claims the new service combines the protection of the U.S. Postal Service with Goodmail’s CertifiedEmail program—where companies pay a fee an agree to abide by certain non-spamming criteria in order to ensure their e-mail gets delivered to certain e-mail inbox providers.

“PostmarkedEmail safeguards email messages using United States Postal Service Electronic Postmark (USPS EPM) technology—an auditable time-and-date stamping service that verifies the authenticity of electronically transmitted documents and files,” the company said in a statement announcing the service.

According to Daniel Dreymann, president and co-founder of Goodmail, PostmarkedEmail can be used to, among other things, send privacy notices and comply with the law.

“It gives e-mail an official aspect that it didn’t have before,” said Dreymann. He added the service can be used for “official things, such as privacy notices that are required to be sent, statements and utility bills … anything you can send in a first-class letter.”

According to Dreymann, the service will cost “something in the neighborhood of 3 cents” per message.

“The competition here is not e-mail, its snail mail, so you’re not adding costs to your e-mail, you’re subtracting costs from your snail mail,” he added.

Dreymann said Goodmail has several customers in beta and that he hopes to announce the companies and make the service widely available by the first quarter of next year.