With millions of people pouring onto the Internet, email addresses are quickly turning into online status symbols, and companies are racing each other to register hundreds of attractive domains.
"You change cities and companies, you have to change email...Not only does [a personalized address] look professional, it sticks with you," says Jerry Sumpton, co-founder of the vanity mail company Mailbank. Even universities like Stanford, MIT, and Princeton are now offering university addresses to alumni who like the status of ivy league email.
Vanity email addresses work quite simply: you pick the email address you want from a list of a company's available domain names, and when your friends start sending you email at that address, the companies forward it to your existing account. You can keep the address as long as you want, and the system will forward email to any new account you get.
"You can change your technology without having to change your email," explains Gary Millin, President of iName. "With a lifetime forwarding service we break people free from their ISP, leaving them free to find the best way to access the Internet."
Trying to find domain names that customers with diverse tastes will want to use as their customized address can also be a costly feat. Mailbank, which is currently selling its $4.95 yearly service to thousands of people across 50 countries, claims to be the biggest domain holder in all the Net, having registered 15,000 .com domains. This feat should mean a $1,500,000 bill coming their way, since InterNIC domain registration costs an initial $100 for 2 years.
However, according to Randy Howard, president of Starmail, companies holding numerous domains like Mailbank aren't paying their bills. Instead, they are simply exploiting a loophole in the registration system which allows people to hold domain names for months without paying before they expire. When they do expire, they simply re-register them. "They're trying to leverage the names, and if they don't sell, they just let them fall off without paying." says Howard, "It's not a bad plan, but they don't have a substantial investment in this."
Howard has opted for the free mail approach to gathering customers, and has accumulated 20,000 customers simply by word of mouth and the appeal of a free address. Users can sign up for a free email address out of the 1,500 names he currently owns, paying just an initial set-up fee, and in return they receive bulk email from Starmail advertisers. "They're aware that it's coming," explains Howard, "So they can't moan and groan and say 'you're spamming me.'"
In the meantime, domain names are being claimed so quickly - according to Mailbank, over 400,000 .com names sold between February and October '96 alone - that many are concerned that the good names will simply run out. But with the "alterNICs" such as name.space emerging to sell personalized top-level domain names, people can create specialized URL's like http://auto.seller. Opening up a whole new realm of top level domains could offer the vanity domain industry even more material to profit from. So far, however, the new domains don't really work.
"It's like the 1-800 days, when 800 numbers hit the market - everyone wanted vanity numbers," comments Howard. "Then they ran out, and now we have 888 numbers."
The most popular names are still family names, personal names being the easiest online identifier. As US Email postmaster Mark Guagliardo explains, "We have the conover.com domain, and now there are hundreds of Conovers around the world using it."
And as for the more original names? Comments Millin, "We've got a huge interest in techie.com, probably because it's still the Net's early adopters."
