With the number of email addresses per person rapidly increasing in the search for a decent ISP or a meaningful name, an Israeli company has come up with a way of tracking old addresses and having email forwarded to the user’s current address. But unlike traditional email forwarding systems, ActiveNames points out that the message itself never passes through its servers – just the old email address that is sent to the current address by ActiveNames’ servers.
The main obstacle to such a system succeeding is that it requires both the sender and receiver to be members of the ActiveNames community in order to work properly. But every time ActiveNames members send an email, it prompts them to add the recipient’s email address to the community, which it says should help it grow rapidly. Whenever messages are sent between two ActiveNames members, the system intercepts the message and confirms that the current email address of the recipient is being used. If the recipient is a member and the most current address is not being used, it sends the message to the correct address.
Because the system only came out of beta this week, there are only a few thousand ActiveNames members at present. But co- founder and CEO Nimo Steinbock plans to spread the word through the press and online ads and believes that if we do something good for the internet, the word gets around. ActiveNames is free to all and the company has no plans to charge for it, although it does plan to offer a revenue-generating shrink-wrapped version for corporate intranets at some point in the future.
ActiveNames members assign themselves a user name, beginning with a plus sign and a password for when they want to change email addresses. The company does not ask for any personal information – just the email addresses. The research and development is done in Israel, but the first server cluster is in downtown Manhattan and the company says the resolution process take no more than two-tenths of a second and claims the current set-up can scale up to two billion users. ActiveNames supports most of the popular email packages, including Netscape, Microsoft Outlook and Qualcomm’s Eudora, running on Windows, Macintosh and Linux.
The company is angel-financed at present, but is in the process of raising money from two unnamed Israeli venture capitalists. The company sounds like a likely acquisition target for a portal or an online service, but Steinbock says that is not his business model. Steinbock was previously at Amdocs, the telecommunications billing systems company that recently went public on Nasdaq-Amex and he likens ActiveNames to the intelligent networking systems in telecommunication that enables tracking of new telephone numbers from old ones. http://www.activenames.net
