Why was TrulyMail created?

Every day, we use email. Email is the most common reason people use the Internet. Email has accomplished so much for society. It allows people from around the world to communicate quickly and easily. We loved email until we started getting spam. When we started getting 10 spam per valid email message, we knew something needed to be done. Then came the spam filters but they all produce false positives (they identify valid email as being spam) and they produce false negatives (they identify spam as valid email) - very frustrating.

Another great email annoyance is the lack of privacy. We do not want our Internet Service Provider to be able to read our messages. It's not that we have a lot to hide, but at the same time, we think only our intended recipients should be able to read what we write. Otherwise we have to watch what we say and that takes the fun out of our communications. We tried PGP, GPG, and other encryption software but it was pointless because it required EVERYONE who received our messages to also install the software (which is never a simple task). PGP and GPG are supposed to work together because they both use the OpenPGP standard but try explaining that to someone at a bank in another country who is not very technical when your messages come through and cannot be read.

Of course, it was also a great problem when we would send a message and wait for a response. We would wait and wait and wait some more. After days we would send another email or place a phone call just to find out if the email was even received. We tried return receipts on email but since the recipient needs to accept to send the receipt (and it only works for reading, not receiving the message) this was a poor solution.

The final issue for us was when we (almost) got tricked by a scam. The scams usually work like this. You get an email and it says it is from PayPal (or CitiBank, JP Morgan, or one of the other big banks). You look at the sender and it says it is from them. You look at the email and it has those logos. It has a link that even includes their domain name. However, what a links looks like and where it takes you are two different things. For example, this link looks like PayPal but is really pointing to our home page: https://www.paypal.com. We realized that having anyone being able to simply claim they are PayPal will only be bad for PayPal customers. We must know that the sender of the message is really the sender. That is, if the message claims to be from PayPal it should really be from PayPal.

We thought about how to solve all of these problems with email. Unfortunately, email's problems are in its design. It was designed long before there were so many people using it. It was created when you could trust just about everyone online.  Unfortunately, it seems that email cannot be fixed. A new system is clearly needed.

So, we thought about all the things we love about email and all the things we wanted to change and we created TrulyMail. TrulyMail solves the problems of spam, of privacy, of knowing when a message was received, and of senders pretending to be someone else.

If you love the convenience of email but have these same frustrations as us, try TrulyMail and see if it works better for you. Be sure to let us know what you think.