Lyris Acquired SparkList Hosting Operations

Lyris to expand hosting business, enhance email marketing features for SparkLIST customers

Berkeley, CA - 1 August 2002 - Lyris Technologies, makers of the world's most popular email marketing software, and SparkLIST.com Corporation, a leading provider of email hosting solutions, today announced that Lyris will acquire the email list hosting operations of SparkLIST.

The sale will substantially expand the size of Lyris' total email list hosting operations, as well as broaden its customer base. Lyris intends to maintain the acquired operations as an independent division under the SparkLIST brand name, with its own service offering, personnel, and web presence.

"This acquisition will provide major benefits to SparkLIST clients," said SparkLIST CEO Christopher Knight. "Lyris has long experience providing its own software as a high-performance email list hosting service, and they recently added a number of major email marketing features to their hosting platform. With this purchase, SparkLIST customers will have much greater access to these powerful, one-to-one marketing capabilities."

"SparkLIST's hosting business is an ideal match for us," said Lyris CEO John Buckman. "Since 1998, SparkLIST has been using our email marketing technology as its hosting platform, and SparkLIST clients are very comfortable with our software's speed and flexibility. As a result, the integration of our operations will be quite streamlined for current SparkLIST customers."

About SparkLIST.com Corporation
With over 800 customers worldwide, SparkLIST.com Corporation is a leading provider of managed email list hosting and messaging solutions. SparkLIST offers email publishers and marketers the high-performance, high-speed, and reliable delivery they need to maximize the power of their permission-based email lists.