SAN FRANCISCO -- Can Coca-Cola pitch soda in a mass email message without it being considered spam?
According to freshly launched Whitehat.com, it can. The company set out Tuesday to lead companies into marketing by email in a nice, polite way.
"It's okay to send email to people if they invite you to send it to them," said Whitehat.com founder and CEO Rodney Joffe at the company's sparsely attended press conference.
"What we're looking to do is to do things the right way for our clients."
To that end, Whitehat.com will help companies set up and use only "opt-in" email marketing lists. Opt-in means recipients of promotional email have granted the sender permission to send the information to them.
The opt-in requirement is central to the anti-spammer's doctrine: No marketing email unless it's solicited. It's no wonder that strict rule underlies Whitehat.com's philosophy -- the company's founding staff is chock-a-block with anti-spam advocates.
Joffe is a chairman of direct marketing service bureau American Computer Group, of which Whitehat.com is a wholly owned subsidiary. He is respected in the anti-spam community as a founder of SAFEeps, a Whitehat predecessor.
SAFEeps sought to establish a database of names and email addresses for marketers, listing people who wanted to be excluded from existing email lists. But in contrast to Whitehat.com, SAFEeps was an opt-out system, in that recipients had to request removal from a list.
Joffe has come full circle to sing the praises of opt-in.
"There is no way to use Whitehat.com and send out unsolicited email in any way, shape, or form."
Whitehat.com board members also include Paul Vixie, co-founder of the Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS), and Ray Everett-Church, anti-spam attorney and counsel for the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail (CAUCE).
Whitehat.com aims to build, maintain, and authenticate true opt-in lists, the only form of legitimate email marketing, said Joffe.
The company bills itself with the slogan: Certified Opt-in.
Whitehat.com will host the email sign-up pages for its clients, and display an opt-in statement to ensure that users clearly understand they will receive marketing information if they sign on.
To protect users' email addresses from misuse, Whitehat.com keeps the information on its servers. The addresses cannot be accessed by Whitehat's client companies.
Four client companies were announced at launch, but only one was identified: Web-data backup firm Connected Corp.
All mail sent to listed addresses will be sent from servers, though the return address will still bear the marketing company's name, such as apple.com or cocacola.com.
