Certifiedemail.com, a year-old start-up has entered the secure internet email tracking business with its eponymous service, launched yesterday. Certifiedemail offers a service whereby senders of email can, for a fee, send a message to another user and get an assurance that the message has been delivered safely. Certifiedemail employs 128-bit encryption that wraps the message as soon as it is received at the company’s data center in Atlanta, Georgia. The recipient does not pay for receiving the email, which is accessed by using the ID number sent to the recipient’s email account to retrieve the message from the certifiedemail.com website. The service requires no additional software. The message is sent from a regular email client to postoffice@certifiedmail.com through the website and then the recipient is notified via an email message. The progress of the message can also be tracked by the sender, which prompts Certifiedemail’s founder, chairman and CEO Court Coursey to call his service the FedEx of email delivery. The concept is not new and Certifiedemail.com will find itself competing against Tumbleweed Software Corp with its Posta product and Netdox. Coursey claimed his company’s pricing model was totally different from Tumbleweed’s, which he also said requires special software client software. The first of those claims is true in a sense, as Tumbleweed only provides its service through OEMs, such as United Parcel Service, which sets its own pricing. But the second is not true – Tumbleweed can be used though a browser but it also offers a client for those that prefer it. UPS charges $2.50 for 1-99 transactions a month within the US using the Tumbleweed technology. The service costs $3.95 a month for up to 20 transactions, then 15 cents for each one after, or $2.00 for a one-time use, billable through an account or a credit card. The messages can either be read, forwarded or deleted by the recipient, who has 30 days to act upon the alert sent to their regular email address before the message is removed. Attachments of almost any kind can also be sent at no additional charge. The company is targeting vertical markets and the first deal has been struck with Endeavor Technologies Inc, a company that runs a service called WebMD.com, a news service for the medical profession and patients. Endeavor is also one of Certifiedemail’s investors. Coursey says a deal with one of the large overnight document delivery companies will be announced soon, but he declined to name names, but the contenders can be guessed easily enough. He said it will be a co-branded offering. Coursey, who is 26, started the company with $250,000 of his own money raised from his previous venture, Truoc Aviation Group, which resold aircraft. In 1994 he took time out to manage the finance office for Guy Milliner’s 1996 gubernatorial bid in Georgia. Millner was unsuccessful but was sufficiently impressed with Coursey to plow $2m of his own money as part of an $8m private placement with individual investors that Coursey completed earlier this year. The beta has been running since January and some 10,000 people have used the service, the company claims.
