Excite Selects Software.com's InterMail as the Email Foundation for its Millions of U.S. Users

              New, Scalable Messaging Infrastructure to Enhance
                     Leading Portal's Webmail Experience

    REDWOOD CITY and SANTA BARBARA, Calif., Sept. 21 /PRNewswire/ --
Excite, Inc. (Nasdaq: XCIT) and Software.com, Inc., the leading developer of
carrier-scale electronic messaging software, today announced that Excite, Inc.
has selected Software.com's InterMail as its new carrier-scale email platform
for serving its millions of U.S. users.  Software.com will become Excite's
primary Web-based email provider effective this fall.
    Designed specifically for large-scale user environments, InterMail will be
the long-term platform for Excite's future email services targeted to the
domestic market, which the company will now operate in-house.  The factors
which were critical in Excite's decision to choose InterMail were its ability
to scale into the millions of users, its proven performance in real world
deployments, and the ability to customize its web interface to create a unique
Webmail experience for Excite's audience.
    "Enhancing our users' personal experience by offering them easy to use,
feature-rich messaging is a highly strategic goal for Excite," says Brett
Bullington, Executive Vice President, Excite, Inc.  "We chose Software.com's
InterMail because it enables us to offer our users the unique experience they
were craving, while satisfying our strict scalability and performance
requirements as we extend messaging capabilities into more aspects of our
service."
    "Excite is an Internet leader because of its unparalleled ability to offer
a wide range of high quality services to its visitors," said John MacFarlane,
CEO of Software.com.  "We are very pleased that Excite has chosen our
messaging products and services and are looking forward to working with them
to enhance their users' enjoyment of the Internet, while making high-quality
messaging a core part of the company's value proposition."
    As one of the Internet's most popular services, receiving millions of
visitors, Excite requires a solution capable of providing Web-based messaging
capabilities to a multi-million-user audience.  Excite will create a custom
interface for their service, while leveraging InterMail's WebMail Server for
optimum scalability, giving it the ability to meet the demands of ever
changing network conditions.

    ABOUT EXCITE
    Founded in 1994, Excite, Inc. is a global media company offering consumers
a personalized Web start page on http://www.excite.com and a "back to basics" Web
search service on http://www.webcrawler.com, and advertises the best one-to-one
marketing services available online.  The Excite Network consists of two of
the largest brands on the Web, Excite (http://www.excite.com) and WebCrawler
(http://www.webcrawler.com), and its subsidiaries: Classifieds2000, MatchLogic, Inc.,
Excite Japan Co., Ltd. and Excite UK, Ltd.  Localized versions of Excite are
available in France, Germany, the UK, The Netherlands, Sweden, Japan and
Australia.  Based in Redwood City, Calif., Excite, Inc. has strategic
relationships with America Online, Inc., Apple Computer, Inc., CUC Investments
Inc., Intuit Inc., Netscape Communications Corp., Prodigy Internet and Tribune
Company.

    ABOUT SOFTWARE.COM
    Founded in 1993 and with over 15 million mailboxes licensed to date,
Software.com has defined the market for carrier-scale messaging server
software with products specifically designed to satisfy the requirements of
national and global service providers offering messaging services to
businesses and consumers.  Unlike enterprise-scale messaging products,
Software.com's carrier-scale products support millions of users with a unique
distributed architecture that features unlimited scalability, high capacity,
high reliability and high availability to ensure that its service provider
customers can offer the highest quality messaging services.
    Software.com's InterMail products are built on native Internet standards
and proven in real-world deployments to be highly reliable, available,
manageable, and scalable.  InterMail products have been chosen by numerous
telcos and ISPs in Asia, the U.S. and Europe, including: AT&T WorldNet(R)
Service, GTE.net, Ameritech.net, BellSouth.net, Bell Atlantic Internet
Services, Erol's Internet (an RCN company), @Home Network, Virgin.net/U.K.,
TelePac/Portugal, KCOM, HongKong Telecom, Telecom Malaysia, Pacific Internet,
and others.   In addition, Software.com partners with the world's largest
service providers and infrastructure vendors such as Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO),
Digital Equipment Corporation, Silicon Graphics, Inc. (NYSE: SGI), and Sun
(Nasdaq: SUNW), as well as Kenan Systems, MediaGate, and Bright Light
Technologies.
    The company has its headquarters in Santa Barbara, Calif. and Lexington,
Mass., and has offices throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia.  Software.com can
be reached in the U.S. at 805-882-2470 or http://www.software.com.