Is there a type of text that works best with the system?

The system has been made to work with any kind of text. For your convenience you can use mail from a mailing list that you have subscribed to or any sort of brand advertising mails that you have received. You can also send a personal text like a love letter to the system in order to generate your very personal treee.

Many treees look alike. Are they really unique?

Yes they are unique like trees in nature. Two oak trees might also look alike, but they are not the same.

Can I create several treees?

Yes, you can create as many treees as you want. We actually encourage you to send as many mails as possible to the system in order to make the virtual forest grow as large as possible.

How were the colors chosen?

The colors are simply the colors that were found in several hundred marketing and advertising mails that the creators of the project had received.

Isn't a system like this wasting energy?

The system runs during idle time of existing servers in the Greenshift green hosting environment. Greenshift hosting has a neutral carbon footprint. Therefore, planting trees for each treee sold actually participates in reducing CO2 in the atmosphere.

Do you read the mails that have been sent to the system?

No, the mails are scanned for keywords by our algorithm. We then extract the parameters in order to create the unique treee and then discard the mail.

Which information do you keep?

We do keep your e-mail address on a secure server. This allows us to give you access to your personal forest of generated treees once you create an account. We will not communicate your address to any 3rd party. You can delete all your personal information by following the link in the footer of our e-mails.

Your text is immediately discarded after the keywords have been extracted and a MD5 checksum has been created. The checksum allows us to make sure that each treee you receive is unique by comparing each new checksum to the checksums of all existing treees.

Which languages does the system understand?

At the moment, the system interprets English, French and German.

How do you plant real trees?

There are companies in several European countries who are specialized in organizing reforestation projects (www.tree-nation.com, www.reforestaction.com, ...). Other companies can participate in financing these programs. These programs plant mostly in deforested areas in Africa and South Amercia. The benefit is 3 fold:

- local inhabitants have employment
- the local living environment is rebuilt
- the planted trees participate in reducing the global CO2 overhead