E-mail Trust Firm Iconix Gets PayPal, Trend Micro Backing

Iconix—a company whose technology aims to restore consumer trust in e-mails from companies with which they do business—has taken a significant step toward gaining a critical mass of users by getting PayPal and Trend Micro to offer its technology to their customers.

Under Iconix’s scheme, users download a small piece of software that verifies the sources of incoming messages using standard authentication techniques, such as Sender ID and DomainKeys. Once the message is verified, the sender is checked against Iconix’s list of registered senders. If the sender is on the list, a so-called Truemark icon is added to the message, which triggers the sending company’s logo to appear in the “from” line, indicating to the recipient it is a legitimate message.

Mousing over the icon causes a certificate to pop up, further verifying the e-mail as legitimately sent by the company it purports itself to be from.

The company’s technology aims to fight the rise in e-mail phishing, where criminals send e-mails purporting to be from an organization the recipient does business with in order to get the recipient’s financial information.

Iconix claims to be signing messages for more than 500 companies. Senders pay a flat rate based on volume. Consumers can download the software free.

Iconix is compatible with Gmail, Yahoo!, MSN, Windows Live Hotmail, Earthlink, and Microsoft Outlook 2003. Notably, the company’s icon does not work on AOL.

Of course, Iconix’s biggest hurdle in its business model is getting consumers to download its software, an act most computer users are understandably hesitant to do. Getting Trend Micro and PayPal to offer the scheme to their customers has increased the number of people downloading Iconix’s plug-in 20 fold from a few months ago, according to Jeff Wilbur, vice president of marketing for Iconix. He declined to give specific numbers.

Though the two companies officially announced their partnership yesterday, Iconix has been working with PayPal for about a year, according to Wilbur.

“They want to make sure anything they release to their customer base as a recommendation is going to work,” said Wilbur. “We went through an internal trial with them and then in the summer and early fall an extensive trial with their users. They officially released it on their site in late December.”

While the deals are certainly a step in the right direction for Iconix, unless the companies involved engage in some outbound marketing pitching Iconix to their customers, getting consumers to download the plug-in will remain an uphill battle, said Deirdre Baird, chief executive of e-mail deliverability firm Pivotal Veracity.

“The Trend Micro deal has the potential to be very important if Trend Micro pushes this solution out to Trend Micro customers and/or builds it into the Trend Micro solution,” said Baird. “However, my understanding right now is that this is simply an option available to Trend Micro customers and they have to go to the Trend Micro site to find this particular piece of software. The same thing applies to PayPal.”

She added: “The company still has a long way to go, but these are absolutely steps in the right direction.”