Please comment on the ippimail project Charity fundraising

I hope you guys don't mind me posting this here. You are the kind of people we need feedback from...

This is a bit long so I have tried to lay it out so you can find your way around more easily.

'Social Enterprise', grbutt roots, community email service.

What makes us different is that we are wanting to raise substantial amounts of *new* money for charities and the Open Source Community.

Ippimail is NOT ABOUT SPAM!!

Contents: 1) What is ippimail? How does it work? 2) What are the aims of ippimail? 3) How did the project come about? 4) What charities are currently involved? 5) Feedback ***************************************************

1) **What is ippimail?

In a nutshell: an email service like Hotmail-Gmail-Yahoo etc. Ippimail is entirely free. Income is generated through advertising in the same way as Gmail.

We offer global mail forwarding to another address (so you can support ippimail and still use your favourite interface), advanced addresses if required and quite a few other bits and bobs like a calendar, notes, to-do etc.

Currently the interface is a slightly modified version of Squirrelmail. We are expecting to move to the Hula server when it's ready.

**How does it work?

You might say it's a 'low-tech' way to create highly targeted advertising as compared to Gmail's 'hi-tech' way.

In order to get an account you anonymously fill out a pretty detailed questionnaire about yourself. This information is then used to target conventional banner ads when you visit the site to read-write your email. That's really it.

In addition, in OS style, individual users will be able to chose which charity-ies they wish to support through their use of the site. The idea is that we can all support our favourite charities on a daily basis but then focus the money on an event (such as the Tsunami a year ago, the Pakistani quake or the hurricane Katrina aftermath), simply by changing our preferences. Once enough money has been diverted to the particular event, we can return our prefs to whatever charities-causes we want.

10% of profits are given to the Open Source community. 45% is given to charities. 45% is re-invested in the project. All work will be Open Sourced.

We believe the very precise targeting we will be able to achieve with our advertising will not only be incredibly valuable (which means a great deal of money raised for charities and OS) but will turn advertising from a 'necessary evil' into a useful resource.

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2) **What are the aims of ippimail?

Other than raising big amounts of *new* money for charities, we want to evangelise and raise awareness of Open Source among a group of people who might otherwise never come across it, the general public.

We want ippimail to become a showcase for Open Source software.

We believe the OS approach will enable us to create the very best, most featurefull, most secure and available email service out there. All in common ownership for the good of everyone.

Due to not having a real profit motive we can also make ippimail the most accessible service for the disabled.

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3) **How did the project come about?

This started as non-developer's attempt at contributing to OS. It then became a Charity fundraiser.

I work in post-production for stills images. I try to make photographers look better ;-)

*************************************************************************************************** 4) **What charities are currently involved?

We are happy to be able to say that the following charities have signed up:

Currently we only have Uk charities signed up as we are Uk based. We want to have a default group of ten charities for each country across the world, in time.

There is no charge for a charity to join us. All we ask is that they link to us from their websites and promote the project to their current supporters through newsletters etc.

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5) **Feedback

We need your constructive criticism on the project. 1) Do you buy in to the concept? 1a) if no, why not? 2) Would you sign up for an account? (what we need more than anything is users at this point) 2a) If not, why not? 3) Will you help us spread the word? 4) Any other comments you wish to make?

Many thanks for your patience! Visit our forums perhaps.

Simon