Weekly activity among Reagan.com email address owners has “more than doubled since the NSA news was released,” a spokesman for the service told The Daily Caller on Friday.
The $40 per year email service promises to “not copy, scan, or sell one word of your email account” and to give President Ronald Reagan’s admirers a conspicuous way to express their fondness — through a @reagan.com email address.
And if the government comes knocking?
“The answer would be no,” Michael Reagan, the son of the late president and a part-owner of the email service, told TheDC Friday.
“We are firm believers in the Fourth Amendment,” agreed Gregory Noack, a Reagan.com spokesman. “We would not participate in any blanket request for any information about our members.”
That could be a compelling selling point for the “official email provider of the conservative movement” — as the site calls itself — following the news that major email providers like Google and Yahoo! have secretly provided the federal government with access to their users’ communications over the years.
“People need to know there is a spot where you can go where these things don’t happen,” Reagan told TheDC.
People are noticing.
“Since a week and a half ago we have seen a significant uptick in business,” Noak explained. “Weekly activity” on the site has “more than doubled since the NSA news was released.”
While the site didn’t provide TheDC with its subscriber numbers, a doubling of activity could represent a significant jump for the fledgling email service, which launched in 2012 with an ad campaign on the widely listened to Rush Limbaugh Program.
The idea for the service stemmed out of conversations between Michael Reagan and a group of conservative business men in Chicago.
The group got together and decided that the same privacy protections used online to help large financial institutions trade investments securely could be extended to everyday users of email. Michael Reagan turned over the keys to Reagan.com and the crew set to work building their answer to the popular “free” email services.
“In any way that we can measure it, it’s been a complete success,” Noak told TheDC. “People not only want their privacy — they value that — they’re learning what it costs to have a free email address.”
He pointed to the advertisements that services like Gmail display to their users based on the content of their inboxes.
Such users “pay for it with their privacy,” Noak said. “That’s why we charge for the service. There are no ads on the site [and] we don’t sell our members information.”
Michael Reagan says the revelation that the bigger emails services give the government access to private communications “absolutely” gives his site an advantage.
“Because it’s a place they can go that doesn’t sell their information, doesn’t give out the information to anyone,” Reagan said. “We just don’t do it.”