In last week's issue, we reported that no vendors had come forward to tell us about the way they encrypt email addresses in their databases.



This week, AdBumb haughtily announced that their vendor, CoolerEmail, did. I dashed off a note to Lars at CoolerEmail, asking whether they did, in fact, encrypt email in the database. Here is his response:

"We use a very light in-house encryption, which makes it difficult for someone who doesn't know much about encryption to be able to read the data. The problem is that it can't be that heavy of an encryption scheme, or our database slows WAY down."

Either Lars is not in sales, or he knew we were going to come asking. "Very light in-house encryption?" Is that like pig Latin?



To me, very light encryption means that once you decipher one address, and have the secret decoder ring, you've can easily deciper them all.



We heard from another vendor this week. After I grill him, I'll report back here about what they're doing.