Interview with the CEO

To view a sample question and answer interview conducted with Zafar Khan, CEO of RPost, browse the questions below and select the questions that you would like to ask. You may use the text from this section in whole or in part for articles, editorials, technical reviews, blogs or in other publication materials.

If you would like other questions answered or other types of quotes, please contact RPost at info@rpost.com

SAMPLE TITLE: Protected or Exposed: Registered E-mail® = Legal Proof™

Editor: What is Registered E-mail?

Khan: The Registered E-mail® service is simple to use and is designed to protect the sender in those instances where the sending, content or time of an e-mail are disputed, in addition to enhancing efficiency and cost-savings. Think of it as legal proof for important e-mail transactions -- proof that can save you time, money, and headaches!

Editor: Why is the Registered E-mail® service important in today’s business climate?

Khan: The simple fact that almost everyone has access to some sort of electronic mail capability causes us to take a lot for granted. While e-mail users are becoming more aware of the electronic record they have created, it is important to consider these electronic records can serve as a critically important defense for business transactions, if properly managed.

In the case of a dispute over content, timing, sending or receiving of an e-mail, the archiving of that e-mail in electronic or printed form provides very little protection after the fact. With two clicks of the mouse, one could change anything in standard e-mail and represent it to be the original e-mail. Therefore, it is important to consider that the recipient of an important e-mail transaction could alter the original e-mail and then subsequently challenge the sender’s archived copy as being fraudulent. Also, the fact that something appears in a “sent” folder does not mean that it was ever sent – one can drag anything into that folder.

Editor: Is it really that easy to alter an e-mail record?

Khan: In most cases, the recipient of standard e-mail messages can easily change the text, the “from” address, the content of the attachments, the “time sent” and also move it to any folder to suit his or her needs in perpetrating a hoax. Plus, the recipient’s computer can be set to read any time other than the actual time.

Just when you need your e-mail record to stand up to scrutiny, your opposition could simply claim that: “they did not receive your e-mail”-- (the critical e-mail you represented as sent and received) or “that is not what your e-mail said” when they received it. Or worse, someone could deliberately manipulate your e-mail, print it out, and represent it as the truth. With standard e-mail records and archives, you are exposed to such challenges without the necessary defense.

Editor: How does the Registered E-mail® service work, in basic terms?

Khan: Just as a signature confirms delivery of FedEx®, a digitally recorded server-to-server dialogue of message acceptance is folded into a Registered Receipt™ e-mail and returned to the sender to confirm delivery and content of the sent Registered E-mail® message. The unique attributes of the RPost® service is the ability to capture the server-to-server dialogue (in practice, servers often do not communicate in full compliance with the standard languages) for the sender, associate that dialogue with the precise content and times of transmission, and interpret the dialogue for the non-technical person.

RPost’s Registered E-mail® system, in capturing the server-to-server dialogue, uses proprietary algorithms to interpret those dialogues for the layperson to understand, and uses cryptography to associate the precise content of the transmission with those dialogues and precise times of sending and receiving. This is packaged in the form of a Registered Receipt™ e-mail, which is retuned to the sender as a durable, verifiable, self-contained record of the entire e-mail transaction. This Registered Receipt™ record can also be used as a verification tool to re-construct the original e-mail content and attachments as needed by the sender as neither RPost® nor any other party store a copy of the e-mail, receipt, or transmission information. The Registered Receipt™ e-mail is the sole official record of the Registered E-mail® transaction. (Note: neither hard-copy letters nor FedEx®, etc. can provide proof of the content transmitted and in this instance; RPost® provides an even higher level of protection.)

Editor: How does this fit within the area of "compliance"?

Khan: Registered E-mail® services allow the sender to prove that they have complied with the byelaw, contractual, or regulated notification provision. While using USPS first class mail, the presumption of “delivery” is evidenced where you have a record of sending; however, under the Uniform Electronic Transaction Act, e-mail "delivery" is evidenced when the recipient's agent, their mail server, has accepted the entire data transmission. Therefore, under electronic statutes, the burden is on the sender to prove "receipt" of the e-mail, which is one of the key features of the RPost® system.

Further, provisions of electronic law and recent court decisions underscore the fact that e-business systems require proper transaction documentation. Often there is a requirement for a reliable recordkeeping management system that can record, retrieve and authenticate electronic messages involving important business communications and transactions (both content of e-mail and attachments, and official time sent and received). The RPost® Registered Receipt™ e-mail is a simple, elegant solution to record retention and proof of notice compliance requirements.

Editor: Would Registered E-mail® messages stand up in court?

Khan: Registered E-mail® messages hold far greater evidential weight than traditional mail, courier, fax, or e-mail, and therefore, should provide the sender with protection that will stand up to scrutiny in a dispute resolution situation. Registered E-mail® would provide the sender the upper hand in any legal discovery disputes.

From the perspective of a mediator, arbitrator, or judicial officer, one looks first at the evidentiary value of what is submitted in gauging its trustworthiness. Evidential weight is about reducing uncertainty surrounding the evidence. The party with the greater evidential weight will win in most cases, or at least mitigate its liability.

Editor: Will Registered E-mail® services integrate seamlessly with other components (archive, records management, document management, etc.) of an overall compliance solution and strategy?

Khan: “Yes.” The Registered E-mail® service seamlessly plugs into virtually any e-mail archive or compliance solution. As a rule of thumb, if your system manages e-mail records, you can easily add Registered E-mail® services to it.

Editor: Creating a compliance strategy requires enterprises to develop processes for effective e-mail management. How do Registered E-mail® services enhance a company’s capability to classify, store, and manage the enormous volume of electronic communications?

Khan: Having spoken to the simplicity of the Registered Receipt™ e-mail for recording purposes, from a sender’s perspective or an organizational perspective, if an electronic message was deemed important enough to have been sent via “Registered E-mail®” than someone, through automated policies or ad-hoc, has classified that e-mail as important enough to then be recorded and archived. Therefore, a first level of classification would be “Registered” = important and archive with distinct policies. Note: In addition to the benefits of the Registered Receipt™ e-mail, the Registered E-mail® service also has the inherent capability of classifying messages with client or customer codes or other significant identifiers.

Editor: Has the legal community begun to embrace this technology?

Khan: Various Bar associations have endorsed the Registered E-mail® services as legal proof for internet e-mail. These organizations want to educate attorneys about effective tools that better their representation of their clients. For example, The Los Angeles County Bar has endorsed the Registered E-mail® service as a tool to reduce cost, simplify processes, and bring the legal community into conformity with modern business practices.

Further, attorney users range from in-house counsel; to legal oriented entities such as the United States Government Accountability Office, an arm of Congress that audits the Federal government; to attorneys at global firms such as Greenberg Traurig; to sole practitioners and small law offices.

Editor: What would you relay to readers as a basic test of whether they should be using Registered E-mail® services for some of their messages?

Khan: The basic test is, does it matter if the original e-mail message is misquoted; never received or read; delivered but its actual receipt denied; insured of content integrity from reader to reader; or challenged based upon the actual time sent and received? Do you have or plan to have a records retention policy or e-mail archive system in place?

If your answer is “yes” to any of these questions, then you should be taking the necessary steps to protect yourself and your clients’ important e-mail transactions with Registered E-mail® services.

Editor: Can you list some of the companies that use Registered E-mail® services?

Khan: RPost has users across various business lines. For instance, United States Government Accountability Office (arm of Congress), United States Department of Commerce (Census Bureau), Greenberg Traurig LLP (global law firm), Watson Wyatt (global professional firm); Macquarie Bank (global financial services company), and Bombardier (global manufacturer), to name just a few.

Editor: How often do your typical users send Registered E-mail® messages?

Khan: Usage patterns are completely dependant upon the task for which they are employed. Special notices, announcements, contract changes, legal filings, reporting requirements, etc. can occur on an ad hoc basis or be recurring electronic messages sent routinely to a wide customer base or to targeted individuals. We have some users who send only a few Registered E-mail messages per month, per week, or per day, while others send a large amount every day.

Editor: Where do you find Registered E-mail® services being used most often within the private sector ?

Khan: Business executives and managers, corporate lawyers, procurement managers, contracts managers, asset, logistics & facilities managers, sales and client relationship managers, automated and policy driven processes, compliance & risk managers, and supply-chain managers are the typical functional areas where our Registered E-mail® service generally is employed. We also see use by human resource professionals for sensitive, action-oriented, official electronic notifications to employees within an organization.

Business e-mail usage is an international fact of life. However, most business e-mail users overlook the accountability that is sacrificed once e-mail messages go out to the Internet. RPost’s Registered E-mail® services have a broad application in the business world, but generally speaking, those people in a company communicating outside of the company are the most frequent users of our Registered E-mail® services.

Editor: Are there certain types of companies that use Registered E-mail® services more than others?

Khan: As a rule of thumb, we see wider use in professional services organizations as compared to operational companies, but in both categories, we see a broad range of usage - heavy, medium, and light. RPost’s Registered E-mail® services have been endorsed by leading professional organizations within the fields of law, insurance, real estate, travel and by the federal auditor of all U.S. government departments. Usage is obviously heavier within these categories, but we also find a number of niche industries, such as companies that certify food as organic, companies that deliver data products, and others coming to recognize the value and need to protect themselves with Registered E-mail® services.

Editor: Is this a software purchase or a service?

Khan: Our service is offered and structured to avoid most of the traditional software purchase issues, such as large up front investments, maintenance fees, etc. Users have found the simplest way to purchase our service is through a pay-as-you-go plan. No investment, no start-up cost, simply pennies per use, with all costs fully loaded into the price per use.

This lets users install the service on their desktop and have it available when they need it – for when they are composing urgent, critical, or last minute e-mail.

Opting for this type of a pricing model presents RPost with challenges it would not have otherwise. For RPost, if customers do not use our service, RPost generates no revenue as opposed to a software purchase that is paid for up front regardless of use. Therefore, RPost has a very strong incentive to ensure that its users are completely satisfied and understand the benefits and the many unique features of the service; thereby ensuring that we always put the customer first.

Editor: How do you view the competitive landscape?

Khan: Because our service is recipient agnostic, meaning that the recipient of a Registered E-mail® message does noting to generate the return of the Registered Receipt™ e-mail to the sender, we do not have a direct competitor. While other companies may offer something that may sound like our Registered E-mail® service, what makes them stand apart from RPost’s Registered E-mail® as a group is the burdensome requirement that the recipient become an active participant in the “protected electronic transaction.” For instance, people can confuse Registered E-mail® services with novelty e-mail tracking or store-and-forward services – both of which tend to work some of the time, require special settings or action by the recipient, store information, tend to be relatively unreliable with false negatives, and do not return legally valid evidence of the precise content and attachments sent and received. On other occasions, people confuse Registered E-mail® services with “encrypted e-mail” – while Registered E-mail® messages use cryptography in the processing; the message itself is not encrypted for privacy unless the sender chooses to do so as an option.

Honestly, our biggest competitor or hurdle is “apathy” on the part of e-mail users. People generally are set in their ways of using e-mail and they love the fact that it is supposedly “free.” We arrive on the scene and proceed to burst many a bubble once we explain the risk; exposure and possible liability of conducting important electronic business transactions without the legal protection of a Registered Receipt™ e-mail, should those transactions become questioned, challenged or simply misrepresented after the fact.

Where paper transactions persist, we must work to show how using Registered E-mail® services provide a more efficient, reliable and cheaper way to conduct routine business transactions compared to fax, certified mail, courier, regular mail, and simple e-mail with a follow-up telephone call. For management, we can show how Registered E-mail® services provide accountability, oversight and record retention protections that are not otherwise present with the old way of conducting business – and at a much lower operational cost!

Registered E-mail® services by RPost remain unique in the marketplace.

Editor: What is your overall strategy and goal?

Khan: Our goal is to put the Power of Proof™ in the hands of every businessperson in the world, in small and large organizations, by bringing accountability, legal protection and efficiency to their e-mail communications. We are setting the de-facto global standard for “Legal Proof” for important e-mail transactions.

Our strategy is simple and straightforward. We work with the most sophisticated industry partners to place the capability of sending Registered E-mail® messages at the fingertips of every business e-mail user on the planet, and to effectively educate them on why, how and when to use the service. We look at a “sophisticated industry partner” as a professional organization, large or small, local or global, that understands how to add the RPost technology to their offerings and/or educate their members and user base on how the service can benefit them by enhancing their specific electronic business transactions.

Editor: How would you describe the market appetite for Registered E-mail® services?

Khan: Registered E-mail® services are still relatively new in the marketplace. An almost universal reaction is…“it just makes sense!” or “it is about time!” Obviously, we are still breaking new ground, but once the seed is planted, the service takes off as users are quick to see the inherent value.

Human nature is such that anything that someone can acquire at a reasonable price, to protect him or herself within the competitive business world against the threat or real legal damages, will sell. Our biggest challenge is to first get before the right business audiences and then to educate them to the fact that they need legal protection and accountability within their electronic business transactions, which they accomplish easily and inexpensively by using RPost’s Registered E-mail® services.

Editor: Are you focused solely on the US market or also the international market?

Khan: We began in the U.S. market, to learn precisely when and why certain businesses use the Registered E-mail® service, but always with the long-range goal of setting the de facto international standard for Registered E-mail® messages that could provide Legal Proof™ of delivery. Having achieved traction in key business segments, we filed for patents that reach over thirty countries and we moved our service to select international markets. Presently, we have a presence in the USA, Europe, Latin America, Australia, Africa and offer our Registered E-mail® service in English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, and Russian. We intend to roll out other languages and more locations shortly.

Editor: Is the RPost technology patented?

Khan: Yes. The RPost® software and systems are unique and have over twenty patents that are pending with two issued, covering thirty-nine countries.

Editor: What specifically are the suite of services associated with the Registered E-mail® service?

Khan: The Registered E-mail® services allow a registered sender to extend the same protections embodied within the Registered Receipt™ e-mail to the recipient as well – even though the recipient has not contracted for the service. The Registered E-mail® message can go “unmarked” so that the recipient is unaware that the message has been sent as a Registered E-mail® message, but with the same protections afforded the sender. For governmental users, the “Official Use” feature guards against inadvertent Freedom of Information Act disclosure related problems. The “Digital Seal™” feature allows the recipient to verify both the authorship and the content of a Registered E-mail® message, and this feature is durable in that each subsequent recipient of forwarded e-mail messages can do the same.

In short, the Registered E-mail® services comprise a suite of service offerings, from special features to protect against hoaxes and phishing, to methods of closing business deals without printing, faxing, and mailing. For example, the Register Reply™ feature coupled with standard electronic signature law, allows any sender to record the back-and-forth e-mail negotiation or agreement – without requiring the recipient to do anything or have anything special other than e-mail. We use this method to close all of our business agreements worldwide – with the speed of e-mail, automated electronic records, and without cost, paper, or faxes.

Editor: How would you describe RPost in 80 words?

Khan: RPost, the leader in managed outbound messaging with its flagship Registered E-mail® services, enable users to send e-mail with proof of delivery – admissible evidence of e-mail content and time sent and received. Advanced services include end-to-end encryption, PDF conversion, information leak protection, e-contracting and e-signing, combined into one tool offered at a flat per e-mail price which is about the cost of a postage stamp. RPost services have been tested, accredited and are used daily by the U.S. federal government.

Editor: How would you describe RPost in 100 words?

Khan: RPost® has set the global standard for accountability in electronic business communications. Its suite of Registered E-mail® services provide the sender of e-mail with legal and verifiable evidence of the content and official time any e-mail is sent and received by anyone, anywhere in the world. RPost® tools permit users in countries around the world to do more, better, faster and at lower cost; with simple-to-use functionality. RPost’s patented services include an integrated set of eContracting, e-signature, security and privacy/encryption tools and are used daily by government, enterprise, as well as small business users.

Editor: How would you describe RPost in 150 words?

Khan: RPost® has set the global standard for Legal Proof™ for e-mail with a suite of managed outbound messaging services. At its core, RPost's patented Registered E-mail® services provide the sender with legally valid evidence of precisely what e-mail content and attachments were sent and received, by whom and when. RPost services include an integrated set of eContracting, e-signature, security and privacy/encryption tools. RPost has strategic business relationships with leading technology and service providers to provide RPost services to their existing clients, including: Pitney Bowes, Postini, Symantec, AT&T, Sprint, Qwest, Orange (FranceTel) and BTInfonet (BritishTel), among others.

Available in five languages, RPost Registered E-mail® services are also used daily by the United States Government and have been endorsed and marketed by many of the influential bar associations in the United States. Headquartered in Los Angeles, RPost has offices in Washington D.C., San Diego and worldwide.