New e-mail service donates to charity every time users send mail

THE WOODLANDS, Texas –– E-mail hasn’t changed much since its heyday when everyone had to jump on board or get left behind, but a small group of developers in Los Angeles is hoping to change that with a charitable twist.

Brothers Sam and Rambod Yadegar decided they wanted to create an e-mail site that changes up the usual formula: for every e-mail sent, a donation is made to a charity of the user’s choice. Advertising revenue pays for the service and 25 percent of that revenue is sent to charities, said Sam Yadegar.

Sam, who has a tech background, said he and his brother lost their mother to cancer and so two years ago they started GiveBackMail. He co-founded it with his brother, paid for it themselves and worked for almost a year before unveiling the beta site.

“I’m not a doctor but I wanted to find a way to use the knowledge I have to serve the greater good,” he said.

So far, Yadegar said, his e-mail service is the only of its kind. And users don’t have to worry about pestering every one of their contacts with a new e-mail address. GiveBackMail can import Yahoo!, Gmail, Hotmail and AOL accounts, similar to Outlook or the Mail app on an iPad or iPhone. When users send out e-mails, it comes from those e-mail addresses, so people never notice anything different.

“That was actually the first feature we had to build,” he said.

The site has grown with word-of-mouth to about 3,000 registered users, many concentrated in California, Texas and New York, he said. Most users are choosing that their donations go to charities working on cancer research, education and poverty.

The company even donated an electronic, interactive whiteboard to a class of second-graders. They received hand-written letters from the class, thanking them for the gift.

Developers at GiveBackMail continue to work on consolidating e-mail accounts for users and are also working on a free app that will likely roll out for iOS then Android and Blackberry, Yadegar said.

“We’ve received great feedback, especially from those who have unfortunately been affected by some loss in their lives,” he said. “At least a couple times a week we receive messages from people that are ecstatic about our e-mail.”