Monday, February 2, 2004

Software

E-mail database provides a Fresh take on change-of-address information

By Elizabeth Dinan

The "a-ha" moment for Austin Bliss came in 1998 after he changed jobs and realized the move meant his long-time e-mail address was suddenly useless.

Over lunch, Bliss complained to a friend that he'd have to undertake the task of forwarding old and new electronic addresses. And he thought aloud that someone ought to build a site where anyone with a change of e-address could register his old and new information.

"With the proper database, old information suddenly has value," Bliss said. "If we did it right, we'd be helping people stay in touch."

So he built that database and six years later is co-founder of FreshAddress, a Newton company that was just awarded a U.S. patent for its "system for storing and retrieving old and new electronic identifiers."

And while the company was built around personal e-mail information, it's evolved to providing corporate and nonprofit entities with periodic e-mail address freshening.

Bliss and co-founders Bill Kaplan, Robert Rosenstein and Robert Mack decided they wouldn't be able to make a living just updating personal information or adding advertising to the site. They then realized what they were doing could be valuable to e-marketing entities.

"It has value to everyone who has a web presence and wants to stay in touch with their clients, customers or constituents," said Kaplan, FreshAddress' CEO.

Pointing to generally accepted figures showing about one-third of all e-mail addresses as going stale each year, the company has since sold its technology and service to British Airways, Brookstone, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, Eastern Mountain Sports, the Dick Gephardt and John Kerry election campaigns, Johnson & Johnson, L.L. Bean, Save the Children and Valpak.

Companies that market via e-mail are reminded by FreshAddress that if they exceed bounced mail percentage limits established by Internet providers (AOL's is 10 percent), their service can be stopped.

"A lot of legitimate companies can exceed," Kaplan said.

So they turn to his company for change-of-address information, as well as when their address lists are flagged for duplicate, blocked, suspicious and malicious addresses, the later of which Kaplan defines as "kids sign(ing) up with swear words that only our young tech people would dare say."

Most clients budget for quarterly updating, while some do it as frequently as every week. Customers send their address lists, some with as many as a half-million lines, to FreshAddress, where each is validated and the whole is returned with a summary report stating the number of invalid, duplicate or otherwise rogue addresses discovered. Coding highlights specifics, so clients can then go into their databases and make changes.

The company's other service, FreshAddress.com, is a free site with security features for registering old and new personal contact information. It links current information to people using expired versions. In other words, mail sent to Joe Smith at his old e-mail address can be forwarded with Smith's permission to his new mailbox after he's registered for free with FreshAddress.com.

And why give it away?

"We don't see a terrific way to monetize that," Kaplan says. "Maybe when we get large enough, as we build a database, we may want to charge for it."

FreshAddress is a private company, funded internally, and its technology is compatible with any database program. Kaplan reports the company is at the financial break-even point, with "a promising quarter coming up." He would not elaborate.

The Newton company competes with ReturnPath of New York, which unveiled similar technology after FreshAddress launched. Asked if he'll go after ReturnPath now that he has the patent, Kaplan says his patent lawyers have advised against speaking about it.

"We're not saying anyone infringed on our patent," he says. "But 2004 should be interesting. We got the patent. Everyone ought to work with us."