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Tumbleweed's Integrated Email Firewall Solution Keeps American Fidelity Compliant with Email Regulations; Reduction in Spam Improves Employee Productivity

Reduction in Spam Improves Employee Productivity

Redwood City, CA — January 12, 2005 — Tumbleweed® Communications Corp. (NASDAQ: TMWD), the leading provider of e-mail and file transfer security solutions, announced today that American Fidelity Assurance Company has deployed Tumbleweed Email Firewall (EMF) with Dynamic Anti-spam Service (DAS) to filter and secure email traffic at the Internet gateway, protecting the company network from spam, viruses, phishing attacks and email fraud. By safeguarding the email network from attack or misuse, Tumbleweed EMF helps American Fidelity enforce corporate policies regarding information use and distribution.

With 1,400 geographically distributed users, American Fidelity has seen rapid and continuous growth due to high standards, conservative management, and operating strategies. This growth came with a price: an exploding volume of email. American Fidelity’s inbound email volume grew from half a million messages per month at the beginning of 2004 to more than 1 million inbound messages in August 2004. Along with the growth in email volume was the increase in the percentage of spam.

After deploying Tumbleweed EMF, American Fidelity quickly reduced their spam volume and detected email-borne viruses not caught by their existing virus filters. Tumbleweed EMF captures over 60% of inbound email as spam at American Fidelity with a minimal number of false positives, and blocks 99.99% of email-borne viruses. American Fidelity’s IT administrators are relieved from constantly updating in-house spam lists, which frees up time and increases productivity. Additionally, Tumbleweed EMF provides American Fidelity with granularity of control, including filtering multimedia and graphical file attachments, and reduces the amount of time and resources devoted to managing spam filters.

“Tumbleweed Email Firewall allows American Fidelity to enforce email policies and compliance,” said Stephen Dunkle, Chief Security Officer for American Fidelity. “Tumbleweed EMF lifted the management burden off of IT administrators and has resulted in significant employee time savings as well as savings in storage and bandwidth.”

We’re pleased to assist American Fidelity in securing their email network against an ever-increasing variety of threats,” said Joe Fisher, Vice President of Product Marketing for Tumbleweed. “Email Firewall was designed to benefit our customers immediately upon installation, both through comprehensive protection and simplicity of installation and management.”

About Tumbleweed's Email Firewall
Tumbleweed Email Firewall has been recognized as having the best email security product functionality by META Group, and was rated the #1 enterprise software solution for fighting spam, according to Network World (http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2003/0915spam.html). Tumbleweed Email Firewall protects, filters and secures email traffic at the Internet gateway with an integrated set of anti-spam, anti-virus, anti-hacker, content filtering, email relay and encrypted messaging capabilities -- minimizing email communications risks and reducing email management costs. Tumbleweed Email Firewall is used by more than 600 of the world's largest, most demanding messaging infrastructures, and is available in both appliance and software editions.

About Tumbleweed's Dynamic Anti-Spam Service
The Tumbleweed Dynamic Anti-Spam Service (DAS) is rated as a top anti-spam service for large enterprises by Network World magazine, and the product is currently used to block over 32 million spam messages per day on behalf of our customers. DAS is an Internet-based subscription service that updates Tumbleweed's Email Firewall and MailGate 2.2 Appliance with new defenses as they are published, similar to the way anti-virus engines work. Tumbleweed's Message Protection Lab develops and publishes the heuristic updates: the Lab is staffed by experts who continually analyze spam to identify new spammer trends and tactics, and create and publish new heuristics to stop them. The Lab analyzes both spam and legitimate email gathered internationally and provided by enterprise customers, to ensure that the Dynamic Anti-Spam Service minimizes false positives in a business environment.

About  Tumbleweed Communications  Corp.
A leading email security, file transfer security and identity validation company with more than 10 years in the business, Tumbleweed provides comprehensive solutions for managing mission critical data communication channels. From our e-mail security suite, point solutions for Spam, inbound and outbound filtering, to secure file transfer and certificate authentication, Tumbleweed has a variety of solutions currently used by enterprises and governments to help mitigate risk and increase network bandwidth. Tumbleweed customers include ABN Amro, Bank of America Securities, Catholic Healthcare West, JP Morgan Chase & Co., The Regence Group (Blue Cross/Blue Shield), St. Luke's Episcopal Healthcare System, the US Food and Drug Administration, and the US Navy and Marine Corps. Tumbleweed was founded in 1993 and is headquartered in Redwood City, Calif. For additional information about Tumbleweed go to www.tumbleweed.com or call 650-216-2000.

SAFE HARBOR STATEMENT
Tumbleweed cautions that forward-looking statements contained in this press release are based on plans and expectations as of the date of the press release, and that a number of factors could cause the actual results to differ materially from the guidance given at this time. These factors are described in the Safe Harbor statement below.

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 efficacy of Tumbleweed's products and potential for sales of those products. 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 15, 2004, Form 10-Q filed May 10, 2004, Form 10-Q filed August 12, 2004, and Form 10-Q filed November 9, 2004.

Tumbleweed assumes no obligation to update information contained in this press release, which represents the Company's expectations only as of the date of this release and should not be viewed as a statement about the Company's expectations after such date. Although this release may remain available on the Company's website or elsewhere, its continued availability does not indicate that the Company is reaffirming or confirming any of the information contained herein.