• by Ross Fadner , January 9, 2004

In an ironic and potentially controversial twist, a popular, premium email management service provider is now offering consumers a free, ad-supported version. The move is ironic, because it will utilize an advertising model - legitimate ads exposed to users who sign up for its service - to manage and supplant other advertising messages: mainly unsolicited email offers - especially spam - from others. The move may prove controversial, because the new service, being introduced this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas by Mailblocks Inc., also has the potential to usurp some legitimate advertising messages that help underwrite other free email services offered by Yahoo!, Hotmail, MSN and others.

A feature of the Mailblocks' free, ad-supported service enables users to consolidate and manage any number of email services - including other free, ad-supported ones - through a central Mailblocks mailbox using Mailblocks' patented challenge/response system.

And it appears that Mailblocks already has aggressive interactive ad marketplace plans for the service. The company has already retained Adtegrity.com and ValueClick Media to sell Mailblocks' ad inventory. Susan Bratton, vice president-sales and marketing at Mailblocks, specifically cited ValueClick Media's access to multiple ad revenue streams and Adtegrity's "service orientation" as key factors in Mailblocks' advertising network selection.

Mailblocks plans to ultimately open space for graphical advertising, search and co-registration. The new ad-supported service will be launched in phases. The first phase will employ large-format, graphical ads including, medium rectangles, skyscrapers, leaderboards and 468 x 60 banners. In the second phase, search placement and co-registration affiliations will be added.

That move could also raise industry eyebrows. In effect, it means a company that markets itself as helping consumers to control and eliminate unsolicited advertisements would also be deploying an ad-based service that utilizes the foggy practice of co-registration.

"Yes, it's a little ironic to run an ad-based service in a company that is effectively trying to eliminate unwanted ads," observes email marketing expert Bill McCloskey. McCloskey, who is president of Emerging Interest and author of MediaPost's new, weekly Email Insider newsletter, adds, "It seems an odd value-proposition for the consumer to provide them with an ad filtering service in exchange for receiving more."

As such, McCloskey says the new Mailblocks service could be seen as indirectly adding fuel to a fire it says it is trying to help consumers put out. "Not that Mailblocks is necessarily doing that," he says, "from a perception standpoint, this is a post-modern, high-tech version of marketers contributing to a problem they're also trying to solve."

Co-registration, which Mailblocks will offer in the future, involves an affiliate partnership with another site, service, or promotion. Most co-registration partnerships involve sharing lists of their users information with each other, however, in most instances, this is on and opt-in or opt-out basis. It is still unclear how Mailblocks will deploy the service.

Mailblocks announcement splits their service plan into three: free, "basic," and "premium" services. The major difference between the services is the amount of storage and the number of "rules" and "trackers," or folders consumers can use as email address aliases so to speak, to receive legitimate commercial messages such as newsletters and e-commerce correspondence. The free service offers only 5 megabytes of storage, while the basic service offers 15 megabytes, and the premium service has 100 megabytes.

While the overall functionality of the free service will be consistent with Mailblocks' paid services, free accounts will not be accessible via desktop email apps, nor will it have the ability to consolidate numerous email accounts. The basic service is $9.95 per year and the premium service is $24.95 per year.