Royal Farros, CEO of MessageCast, was the last presenter on the last day of September’s annual Direct Marketing Association meeting in New Orleans. But to hear him tell it, he didn’t mind bringing up the rear. After all, he’s got something better than e-mail.

“Of all the topics talked about in all the presentations, there wasn’t one that was more significant to direct marketers who are worried about their e-mail pipes shutting down than the realization that there’s a whole new, better set of pipes out there,” he says.

In his view, e-mail as it exists today involves consumers who don’t trust senders, senders who must get permission to mail and must be sure to clean names off their mailing lists within ten days if requested, and a looming threat of tightening government regulation.

MessageCast’s answer to this spiral is to combine two up-and-coming elements of the Internet: the real-time networks that carry instant messages for some 300 million users around the globe, and the RSS format that lets content get delivered over a variety of devices, from desktops and e-mail to cell phones and PDAs.

“The number one reason why today’s e-mail pipelines are clogged is that it’s a non-authenticated network, in which anybody can send anything to anybody,” Farros says. “If the way you solve this is by authenticating it, well, there’s already an authenticated network out there–it’s the same pipes that carry instant messaging traffic and alerting traffic. It’s already populated; it’s robust; and you can move e-mail and short messaging service (SMS) messages across it.”

It’s also got permission built in. When users sign up with content publishers using MessageCast’s platform, they don’t give out contact information but simply indicate that certain companies can contact them. MessageCast takes the messages from the sender and streams it to the recipient over the IM network. Users can be confident their contact info won’t be resold; there are no addresses to resell.

Using that closed IM channel—where you can’t get in without an invitation, so to speak—means that messages sent through MessageCast fly beneath the radar of the spam filters that trap as much as 40% of legitimate e-mail traffic. “We work with the popular real-time networks– Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo,” Farros says. “Not coincidentally, those three have the biggest filters out there as well. So when we’re working across the Microsoft network, for example, Microsoft says, ‘They’re coming across the real-time network; they can’t be on here unless one, the user has authenticated himself, and two, he has opted to get this material.’”

Then there’s the advantage that comes from RSS’s flexibility. Depending on whom you speak to, RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. The name suggests what it has been used for since the ‘90s—to send out news copy in real time to interested parties. The stories are delivered with a short header that lets the recipient decide whether or not to click on the full story. Today, RSS underlies the profusion of blogs that have turned the Internet into one big continuous news-and-commentary feed.

IM is a confirmed delivery channel; you can tell if the user is present on the network. So end-users can specify that they prefer to receive their messages at their computer desktop. But if they’re not online, messages should go to their cell phone via SMS, or be sent to their mailbox.

This road map to the customer solves the e-mail deliverability problem and the underperformance of much online advertising, according to Farros. “Dwindling click-throughs are a marketing fact. We get permission to send something to you, and then we find you on the network.” MessageCast back that deliverability up with tools that senders can use to track numbers of subscribers, which messages were sent, and which ones were clicked on. Downstream reporting tools track sales conversions. Through all of these metrics, the customer remains safely anonymous.

Farros is also careful to point out that his company’s service is not instant messaging; it merely uses the presence component of IM to locate the recipient, who does not need to subscribe to any IM service. As for any worries that MessageCast will encourage the rise of RSS spam, the real-time network won’t allow abusers to blast a million instant messages as easily or cheaply as they can a million e-mails.

A longtime Internet entrepreneur, Farros helped found iPrint, an online printing startup in the ‘90s. When he and his co-founders sold that business to a larger concern, they looked around the Internet landscape for the next Big Idea. “We saw spam getting worse, and IM use exploding,” he says. “And we said, suppose you took that e-mail traffic and put it across those IM pipes? You’d get a better way to communicate with customers—permission-based, over authenticated pipes, with the ability to track presence and ten to twenty times better message performance. That was our ‘Aha!’ moment. Now we have to convince other marketers to put it together.”

Royal Farros, CEO of MessageCast, was the last presenter on the last day of September’s annual Direct Marketing Association meeting in New Orleans. But to hear him tell it, he didn’t mind bringing up the rear. After all, he’s got something better than e-mail.

“Of all the topics talked about in all the presentations, there wasn’t one that was more significant to direct marketers who are worried about their e-mail pipes shutting down than the realization that there’s a whole new, better set of pipes out there,” he says.

In his view, e-mail as it exists today involves consumers who don’t trust senders, senders who must get permission to mail and must be sure to clean names off their mailing lists within ten days if requested, and a looming threat of tightening government regulation.

MessageCast’s answer to this spiral is to combine two up-and-coming elements of the Internet: the real-time networks that carry instant messages for some 300 million users around the globe, and the RSS format that lets content get delivered over a variety of devices, from desktops and e-mail to cell phones and PDAs.

“The number one reason why today’s e-mail pipelines are clogged is that it’s a non-authenticated network, in which anybody can send anything to anybody,” Farros says. “If the way you solve this is by authenticating it, well, there’s already an authenticated network out there–it’s the same pipes that carry instant messaging traffic and alerting traffic. It’s already populated; it’s robust; and you can move e-mail and short messaging service (SMS) messages across it.”

It’s also got permission built in. When users sign up with content publishers using MessageCast’s platform, they don’t give out contact information but simply indicate that certain companies can contact them. MessageCast takes the messages from the sender and streams it to the recipient over the IM network. Users can be confident their contact info won’t be resold; there are no addresses to resell.

Using that closed IM channel—where you can’t get in without an invitation, so to speak—means that messages sent through MessageCast fly beneath the radar of the spam filters that trap as much as 40% of legitimate e-mail traffic. “We work with the popular real-time networks– Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo,” Farros says. “Not coincidentally, those three have the biggest filters out there as well. So when we’re working across the Microsoft network, for example, Microsoft says, ‘They’re coming across the real-time network; they can’t be on here unless one, the user has authenticated himself, and two, he has opted to get this material.’”

Then there’s the advantage that comes from RSS’s flexibility. Depending on whom you speak to, RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. The name suggests what it has been used for since the ‘90s—to send out news copy in real time to interested parties. The stories are delivered with a short header that lets the recipient decide whether or not to click on the full story. Today, RSS underlies the profusion of blogs that have turned the Internet into one big continuous news-and-commentary feed.

IM is a confirmed delivery channel; you can tell if the user is present on the network. So end-users can specify that they prefer to receive their messages at their computer desktop. But if they’re not online, messages should go to their cell phone via SMS, or be sent to their mailbox.

This road map to the customer solves the e-mail deliverability problem and the underperformance of much online advertising, according to Farros. “Dwindling click-throughs are a marketing fact. We get permission to send something to you, and then we find you on the network.” MessageCast back that deliverability up with tools that senders can use to track numbers of subscribers, which messages were sent, and which ones were clicked on. Downstream reporting tools track sales conversions. Through all of these metrics, the customer remains safely anonymous.

Farros is also careful to point out that his company’s service is not instant messaging; it merely uses the presence component of IM to locate the recipient, who does not need to subscribe to any IM service. As for any worries that MessageCast will encourage the rise of RSS spam, the real-time network won’t allow abusers to blast a million instant messages as easily or cheaply as they can a million e-mails.

A longtime Internet entrepreneur, Farros helped found iPrint, an online printing startup in the ‘90s. When he and his co-founders sold that business to a larger concern, they looked around the Internet landscape for the next Big Idea. “We saw spam getting worse, and IM use exploding,” he says. “And we said, suppose you took that e-mail traffic and put it across those IM pipes? You’d get a better way to communicate with customers—permission-based, over authenticated pipes, with the ability to track presence and ten to twenty times better message performance. That was our ‘Aha!’ moment. Now we have to convince other marketers to put it together.”