Salvador Baqués was little more than a child when he started playing music with his friends and exchanging emails with his songs and covers. He constantly had trouble sending them, and wondered why he couldn't listen to music without opening files in programs external to email. This question remained over time and, a decade later, he began to wonder if it would be possible to create one with a more advanced code than the traditional one.
Baqués then stopped asking himself this question, and posed it to a university colleague with whom he had developed an email application for marketing campaigns. At that time, his colleague called the idea impossible. Now, together with two other entrepreneurs, they are finalizing their Email 5 project from Barcelona, which aims to represent a paradigm shift for email when it launches in 2024. The team is completed by Alonso Pérez Silva and Ghislain Moncharmont.
Email services have hardly evolved in the last 20 years and have maintained the same limitations since then. "It's a very entrenched industry," criticizes Baqués. Many initiatives have tried for years to improve this service through open standards, but the attempts have not come to fruition. Until they tried: "We have done it and we have implemented it."
The improvements that Email 5 offers compared to conventional email services range from security to improved multimedia support, as well as effective tools to avoid spam. And the project guarantees user privacy, as it stores the necessary data in a decentralized way. It is a privacy first model, as Baqués explains. "We don't store any data, but rather it is stored divided across servers." Only the user can regroup them with their key, so they are protected and out of reach of third parties.
The team of entrepreneurs has also set out to end the problem of spam. And they have done so with two tools: the possibility of creating accounts associated with the main email to avoid giving this address to third parties, or generating an alias. This is a parallel account connected to the main one that exists only for 24 hours. Baqués has accumulated more than 100 aliases created, and no unwanted emails in the inbox of his main account.
"Traditional filters against spam are like a game of cat and mouse. We want to give users tools and knowledge" so they can fight it themselves through the new service. This service also offers improved multimedia support, taking advantage of Web3 advancements and the introduction of the HTML5 standard. The new service offers a format that includes advanced design options and multimedia support such as videos and audio within messages, as well as interactive elements. "Within the email itself, we can create a kind of webpage." They even foresee that purchases can be made with a click, without the need to leave the email or use other online shopping tools.
Launch in 2024
The service will be free with its basic functions, and will offer two paid versions with premium options at a price to be determined, which will be around 50 to 60 euros per year. With an annual or monthly fee, the user will have cryptocurrencies that they can allocate to the premium services they require, such as the purchase of more aliases to avoid spam. These paid services also include e-mail marketing tools, with which they want to lower the price of traditional companies. The price per send has not varied in the last 15 years, and Email 5 will propose a price per email 100 times cheaper, according to Baqués.
They are finalizing an investment group to allocate 380,000 euros to the initiative and launch the service with a pre-phase limited to 1,000 users before opening it to the general publicThe team of entrepreneurs plans to launch Email 5 publicly in 2024. They have boosted the project with 100,000 euros from two public loans, and are now studying with an investment group to allocate about 400,000 dollars (380,000 euros) to the initiative. With this investment, they could launch the application. They plan to do so with a preface of launch for 1,000 users, of those who want to receive their feedback before opening the service to the general public.
To finalize Email 5 and its launch, they also need to expand the team to at least double its size, according to Baqués. He assures that, whatever happens after its launch, they rule out the possibility of selling Email 5 for at least three years, at any price. "There is a lot of work to do and it has been many years of pursuing all this," chasing the goal of revolutionizing email communication by solving the deficiencies of traditional services.