Tumbleweed Announces IME Assist

Automating customer inquiries completes the statement presentment cycle

REDWOOD CITY, CA - June 29, 2000 - Tumbleweed® Communications Corp. (Nasdaq:TMWD), a leading provider of advanced email solutions for business communications, today announced IME Assist, a secure online communications application designed to automate context-based responses to customer inquiries, such as inquiries regarding statements received online.

IME Assist is an application that enables end user customers who receive statements (such as bills, account statements, etc.) via Tumbleweed Integrated Messaging ExchangeT (IMET) from businesses to make inquiries regarding those statements. IME Assist leverages the context in which a customer inquiry is sent to receive, route and respond to those inquiries. IME Assist runs on Tumbleweed IME, a platform and set of applications for creating secure communications channels between a business and its customers, partners, and suppliers.

"Companies who deliver statements online can define a secure two-way communications channel to interact with their customers about those statements. This establishes strong online customer relationships - the most valuable commodity in e-business," said Jeffrey C. Smith, president and CEO, Tumbleweed Communications Corp. "In fact, automating the preparation and presentation of statements for customers is a multi-step process. It includes extracting legacy data, personalizing it to be delivered online, securely delivering it online and providing the ability to archive it. A critical and often overlooked step is the last, enabling customers to communicate regarding their statements. Automating this feedback loop solidifies the online business relationship in a way that no other technology can."

"To develop strong online relationships, companies need to engage their customers," said Avivah Litan, Gartner Group. "Statement presentment is as much about maintaining a customer relationship as it is about delivering information efficiently online. A recent Gartner survey of 175 major U.S. companies found that reducing costs and managing customer relationships more effectively were the number one and two drivers for electronic bill delivery."

IME Assist includes web-based forms for initiating customer requests in different contexts. A customer who receives a statement via IME and wishes to submit an inquiry about it has access to a web form that helps define the context and content of the inquiry. This method enables a wide range of customer inquiries to be automatically processed. A rules-based routing system within IME Assist dispatches the customer inquiry to automated processing agents, external applications or directly to customer service representatives.

About Tumbleweed Communications Corp.
Tumbleweed is a leading provider of solutions for managing secure communication and collaboration to enable the business Internet. Tumbleweed's robust policy-based framework empowers organizations to safely share and protect critical information, increase customer loyalty and privacy and dramatically reduce costs. Tumbleweed is trusted by 1,000 blue-chip customers including American Express, Chevron, Datek Online, the European Union's Joint Research Council, First Union Wachovia, John Deere, Merrill Lynch, Nike, Northern Trust, NTT, Salomon Smith Barney, Travelers and US Food and Drug Administration. One hundred of the Fortune 500 are Tumbleweed customers. Tumbleweed Communications was founded in 1993 and is headquartered in Redwood City, Calif., with offices around the world.

Except for the historical information contained herein, the matters discussed in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected, particularly with respect to the security features of Tumbleweed's products and the activities of any third party. In some cases, forward-looking statements can be identified by terminology such as "may," "will," "should," "potential," "continue," "expects," "anticipates," "intends," "plans," "believes," "estimates," and similar expressions. For further cautions about the risks of investing in Tumbleweed, we refer you to the documents Tumbleweed files from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, particularly Tumbleweed's Form 10-K filed March 30, 2001 and Form 10-Q filed November 13, 2001. Tumbleweed assumes no obligation to update information contained in this press release.