When you use Trustifi to postmark an email, a copy of the email, including any attachments, is time-stamped and secured by Trustifi with an Authentidate licensed United States Postal Service Electronic Postmark®. The USPS Electronic Postmark is an official record that the email was transmitted at a precise date and time. Further, a hash of the email header, contents and attachments is created at the time of time- stamping (this means that a mathematical algorithm is applied to the email to create a unique digital "fingerprint" of it). The The Trustifi Postmarked Email service keeps the hash record, so that if you ever need to prove the sending or contents of the email, you may do so against the hash record maintained by the service.

The Trustifi Postmarked Email solution does not require any software or plug-in. Once you are registered, you or your firm will have to purchase a block of United States Postal Service Electronic Postmark (EPM) credits. Then, when you write an email, to postmark it, you only need to send a copy of the email addressed to Trustifi in the cc line. You address an email to Trustifi by writing any prefix you like "@trustifi.com" - for example, jones.contract@trustifi.com. An email addressed in this way will be picked up by Trustifi servers and an Electronic Postmark will be applied and stored in your user account under the "jones" folder and "contract" email (sub)folder.

No. Anything you send @trustifi.com will get to us and be postmarked. We recommend using the cc line so that replies to your original email sent "reply to all" will also get postmarked. The "to" line provides the same result. The "bcc" line does not, however, and you should use the "bcc" line for the @trustifi.com copy if you do not want the "replies to all" to be postmarked. Using the bcc line also prevents third party recipients from seeing the prefix you select for the Trustifi copy.

A hash record cannot be read, and cannot be reversed to regenerate the email. Consequently, you need never worry about Post Office personnel reading your confidential email communications.

Every letter of an email, and even punctuation marks and spaces, are converted into the hash that is stored by USPS. If you want to prove that a particular email document is the one you say was sent to a particular party at a particular time, then this document, known as a "challenge file," may be reduced to a hash value using the same algorithm that was applied to the original. The hash value of the challenge file may then be compared to the hash value of the original and, if they are the same, the validity of the challenge file is proven. If even one character (or even one bit) is different in the challenge file, the hash will not match and the two will be shown not to be the same.

First, you need to find the time-stamped copy of the email. This is the copy you receive, as an attachment in the "Postmarked by Trustifi" confirmation email, about a minute after you send an email for postmarking. See below: "How do I know my email was successfully postmarked by Trustifi when I send it?" If you cannot find it, see below: "How can I obtain my postmarked email receipt if I deleted it by mistake? "

Second, simply forward the "Postmarked by Trustifi" confirmation email, which contains the postmarked email, to email@verify.trustifi.com; if you were the original sender or an original recipient, a verification confirmation email will be returned to you by email. The Authentidate licensed USPS Electronic Postmark (EPM) is verified by effectively confirming and reversing the EPM process, and cross-referencing the unique EPM Receipt ID with the USPS® postmark service.

Trustifi automatically keeps a copy of every email you postmark on its secured servers for a period of seven years. You can find any email you have ever postmarked through Trustifi in the last seven years by looking it up in the Dashboard at www.trustifi.com. You must log in to the website to gain access to the emails you have postmarked. This copy of the email may then be verified as being identical to the one used to generate the hash and Electronic Postmark stored by the Authentidate licensed USPS Electronic Postmark Service.

Trustifi keeps both a copy and a hash of your email. If Trustifi did not store a copy of your original email, then Trustifi could not help you verify an email you lost. To maintain the confidentiality of your emails in circumstances where copies of the emails are stored by Trustifi, access to the emails requires a user I.D. and password. Only you, not Trustifi support staff, have your password.

You may indicate to Trustifi that you "forgot your password" by clicking on the applicable homepage link. A new password will be sent to the account email address. If you are no longer in control of the account email address, with sufficient proof of your identity, Trustifi may issue you a new account email address and password, but only after sending notification to the original account email address and allowing sufficient time for reply. In the case of group or firm membership, Trustifi may opt to contact representatives of the firm to further vet identity.

Yes. The time stamp and contents to copied parties is proven, because the entire email header, except for bcc (blind copy) parties, is hashed and time-stamped along with the contents and attachments.

Yes. Emails to your recipient parties travel directly from you to the recipient parties, so there is no initial indication that the email they are receiving has been postmarked. However, a minute or so after the recipients receive your postmarked email, Trustifi sends them a follow-up email in which they are notified that the email was postmarked, and an explanation of what this means. The purpose of this notification is to make it clear to recipient parties that the email can be proven if it is ever challenged, so that they will never challenge it in the first place, removing an entire layer of potential controversy. In addition to these explanations, recipient parties receive an exact copy of what was postmarked in an attachment to the postmark receipt, as well as a (redundant) link to the original postmarked email. This way, recipients know precisely what can be proven, and can "see" that the postmark works. If the recipient is already a Trustifi user or becomes one within thirty days of the follow-up email, the original postmarked email becomes accessible in the Dashboard of the recipient's account.

Trustifi will also automatically send you a confirmation email within a minute or so of you sending the postmarked email, informing you that the email was or was not successfully postmarked. If the postmark was successful, you will receive a postmark receipt as well as the original postmarked file as attachments. If the postmark was not successful, you will be notified by email of the reason why and possible action required.

If you do not receive a confirmation email, check the Dashboard of the account email address used to send the email. If you find the email, expand the entry and select "Send Email Copy" to send a copy to your account email address. If you cannot find the entry, then check "Pending" in your Admin section and follow the instructions found there. If you still cannot find the email, and it has not been returned to your inbox as "bounced" email, then you may have typed an incorrect "@trustifi.com" address (see below: "How does prefixing work?").

An email you postmark may not be successfully postmarked for any of the following reasons: you typed in an address erroneously; you did not have enough credits to postmark the email; you do not have a Trustifi account; or the file was too large.

Anything over 25MB is too large. However, this is not a problem as a practical matter, because most ISPs and mail server configurations do not allow email files over 15MB anyway. To be clear, emails over 15MB are typically bounced by your internet service provider and never reach Trustifi.

You may postmark email with attachments in any file format allowed by your email software.

We suggest you unclutter your inbox by (1) creating a "Postmark Receipts" folder in your email program and moving the receipts to that folder, or (2) having your secretary or administrator store the receipts for you.

Log into your account and go to the Dashboard. Locate the deleted email by navigating the folders or by using the keyword search capability. Expand the entry by clicking on the [+]. You will then be able to have the postmark receipt emailed to the account email address using the "Send Email Copy" link, or to print it using the "Print Postmark Receipt" link.

The law is becoming increasingly comfortable with electronic documents and commerce. The Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (ESIGN) at the federal level, and the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) at the state level, confirm the legal status of electronic documents, contracts, signatures and transactions. For its part, the Authentidate licensed USPS Electronic Postmark now makes it possible to prove — far more easily than before — that an email was sent, because numerous federal and state statutes, as well as court precedent, recognize the United States Postal Service as an official means of communication. To challenge the validity of your Trustifi Postmarked Email, a party would have to contend that the USPS time stamp and hash record of contents are inaccurate, as opposed to records you keep yourself.

Most laws require proof that communications were sent, not that they were received. This is because a party seeking to deny receipt of a communication can always claim, for example, that an envelope delivered by certified mail was empty, or that an email was deleted before it was read. Thus, under UETA, "an electronic record is received when (1) it enters an information processing system that the recipient has designated or uses for the purpose of receiving electronic records or information of the type sent and from which the recipient is able to retrieve the electronic record; and (2) it is in a form capable of being processed by that system." UETA 15(b). Trustifi Postmarked Email provides proof with the Authentidate licensed US Postal Service Electronic Postmark that this standard has been satisfied (assuming you are using an appropriate email address for the recipient party). As a practical matter, postmarking email eliminates authenticity of the email as an issue.

Your Trustifi account is based on your email address, not your computer. As long as you send an email from an email address you have registered with Trustifi, if you send a copy to Trustifi (@trustifi.com), the email can be successfully postmarked.

Yes. Trustifi is 100% platform agnostic. Send the Trustifi copy from your smartphone or email enabled mobile phone just as you would send any other copy.

You can use almost any prefix with the @trustifi.com address, and the email will be successfully postmarked. However, prefixing is a powerful tool for pass-through billing to clients. If you observe the format "client.matter@trustifi.com," Trustifi will be able to give back to you an itemized statement of charges organized by client and matter, enabling you to conveniently post Trustifi charges to client invoices. For example, if you are sending a postmarked email regarding the client "Smith" and the matter "Mortgage," you address the Trustifi copy as smith.mortgage@trustifi.com. When you receive your statement from Trustifi at the end of the billing period, all of the postmarked emails charged to Smith/Mortgage will be grouped under that heading.

Trustifi will use what you give to Trustifi. If you type smit.mortgage@trustifi.com instead of smith.mortgage@trustifi.com, then there will be an additional heading on the statement for that billing period Smit/Mortgage, with just the one email listed under it. Typically, auto-fill will complete an address after the first time you have used that address, and misspelling will not be a problem. Also, you may move an email you addressed incorrectly to the correct folder or subfolder for accurate record-keeping.

Yes. These characters: !#$%&‘*+/=?^'{|}~ are not generally available for email addresses and, therefore, cannot be used for prefixing. Also, a "." may not be used as the first or last character of a prefix, nor can there be two periods in a row (..).

The Dashboard is where you manage your Trustifi account. To get to the Dashboard, go to www.trustifi.com, log in, and go to your account. At the Dashboard, you can customize your user settings, buy credits, administer company groups, access reports, organize entries of postmarked emails you have sent or received, search emails, print postmark receipts, and re-send them.

Each email prefix you create when sending postmarked emails becomes a folder or email folder in the Dashboard. If you observe the client.matter@trustifi.com format, then you will have an alphabetized list of folders by client name containing, in turn, subfolders of specific matters. Postmarked emails you have sent will reside within these email folders. If you wish to move a postmarked email from one email folder to another, you can do this. The Dashboard can perform simple keyword searches and more advanced parametric searches to help you find postmarked emails.

UTC is the acronym for Coordinated Universal Time, basically, Greenwich Mean Time, but without adjustment for daylight savings time, etc. For consistency, all postmarked emails will bear a UTC time stamp. However, for your convenience and the convenience of recipient parties, Trustifi will also supply you with the time stamp in Pacific, Mountain, Central and Eastern time zones.

No. Trustifi does not publish any information collected on accounts or contained in emails for postmarking. There are no publicly accessible lists or indexes of users, folders or email folders. Search engines such as Google cannot access this information, and it will not appear in their results.