In today's ever growing culture of litigation one of the most sensitive issues is e-mail authentication.

And that is exactly what Bermuda-incorporated company RPost, which was on show at a booth at the Risk and Insurance Management Society (RIMS) 2008 conference in San Diego on Monday, offers its clients in the form of its registered e-mail service and SideNote service.

For the firm, whose parent company RPost International Ltd. set up on the Island in 2000 and which has wholly-owned subsidiaries, RPost US and RPost UK, addresses best practices in establishing e-mail usage policies to safeguard corporations against liability associated with e-discovery and other regulations governing electronic data.

With more communications and contracts being carried out electronically, companies need accountability and protection for their outbound e-mail.

In light of recent e-discovery and e-admissibility rulings making it imperative to have a solid retention and authentication system in place to avoid sanctions, fines, legal fees and even loss of litigation on process grounds.

To mitigate the risk associated with standard e-mail archives, RIMS is working with RPost to provide the registered email service as such a safeguard, thus protecting the sender through an automatically returned registered receipt e-mail offering legally verifiable proof of message delivery and content with an official time stamp for e-mail sent to any Internet address.

Zafar Khan, chief executive officer of RPost, explained that the service ensures that the message content is sent and received from anywhere in the world.

Mr. Khan, whose company's customers include the US government and law firms, financial institutions and insurance companies, as well as working in partnership with the Cayman Islands government, said users of the registered e-mail service pay to be protected if anything of consequence happens in the future.

Among the features it boasts are sent, registered or signed authentications, conversion to PDF format and electronically signed documents.

The other product which Mr. Khan provides is the SideNote, which is designed to save time, cut down on email overload and improve overall collaboration.

It works by allowing the sender to include private comments and instructions to cc and bcc email recipients on the original message, eliminating the requirement to forward additional copies and make follow-up calls.

And Mr. Khan revealed his company is in the middle of discussions with Bermuda's government to adopt the service.

"We are deep in the review process with a very specific implementation with the Bermuda Government right now," he said.

"They reported it to be something very interesting for them and so it certainly does have an application for them."

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