More than a decade after its first release, KidMail continues to delight children, while also providing a critically important safe communication framework. KidMail is brought to you by a group of concerned parents (well, most of us are parents; we're all deeply concerned about child safety!). We are based in the USA's Pacific Northwest and two beautiful regions of India.

We'd like to tell you a bit about ourselves and
about how KidMail and the KidMail.net service came to be.

KidMail was originally created by a Seattle-area company known as ConnectSoft. This company was a well-established e-mail software publisher catering to the communication needs of businesses and individual PC users.

The innovative KidMail product concept was conceived and prototyped in 1993, at which time it was first shown to leading PC journalists and potential customers. The enthusiastic reaction prompted ConnectSoft management to move forward with full-scale development.

By autumn of 1994, version 1.0 of the KidMail software was finally completed and released for retail distribution. The initial version did not yet support graphical messages, but it introduced the entertaining, interactive, and age-appropriate user interface that you see today.

Looking back, KidMail was quite a visionary product - way too early for its own good! It's almost hard to imagine, but the Internet was not yet in widespread use (it was referred to as the "information superhighway" back then). Netscape had not yet popularized the web. SPAM was a word that few people knew as anything other than a popular lunch meat!

Version 1.0 of KidMail was designed to work with MCI-Mail, CompuServe, and the Prodigy online service. Later versions added support for a fledgling online service called AOL, and yes, the Information Superhighway too . Retail sales just barely reached $1 million by the time version 3.0 was launched in 1995, sporting improved graphics, improved spam filtering, and additional messaging themes.

In 1996 ConnectSoft was sold to a publicly traded holding company. Several months later, the new ownership shifted focus primarily to corporate markets. As a result, KidMail fell out of the spotlight for some time, despite the rapidly expanding consumer and family use of e-mail.

In 1998 the product and trademarks were re-acquired by the original founder of ConnectSoft to better support the customer base and distributors.

In 2002, the management team of Trustworthy Communication LLC (comprised largely of former Microsoft and ConnectSoft managers, most of whom are parents of young children) decided to focus attention on KidMail.

We realized that the market was now more than ready for what we had to offer. We also realized that a technological overhaul of KidMail was needed. Support for graphically formatted messages was essential, as was a "kid's word processor" to make it possible for children to easily create such messages.

Versions 1 through 3 of KidMail had attempted to filter Spam messages using a technology that was called CSAC (ConnectSoft Access Controls). It was a spam filter which ran on the same PC as the KidMail software. This technology was outdated and unable to detect all the modern variations of spam.

We realized from our past experience that there is only one practical solution to guard 100% against spam and possible pedophile contact. It is necessary to have a service requiring parental approval of quarantined messages, sorted by the trust level of the contact. We also realized that by utilizing a server-based approach we could enable parents to receive and review messages at any time, from any location. Parents also desire the flexibility to be able to review messages immediately as they are received or in batches, at some convenient time. Equally importantly, this system design makes it possible for children to use other e-mail software such as IncrediMail and Outlook to suit their preferences and maturity level. Hence, development of the KidMail.net Safe E-Mail Service.