Q&A with Rmail’s Randy Charles Morin

In less than a year, Randy Charles Morin turned an idea for an RSS e-mail service into a company, Rmail, and then an acquisition after it was picked up earlier this week by NBC Universal. Randy answered a few questions about Rmail and the NBCU deal.

1. What did you start Rmail? What were you hoping to achieve?

I started Rmail on April 25th 2005. Before that I was running the KBCafe blogging network and needed an RSS-to-email solution. I tried several services (Bloglet was one) and they either didn’t work reliably or didn’t work at all. So, I created a webpage where any user could subscribe to any RSS feed and a widget that I could put on my blogs.

2. How many users does Rmail now have? How many e-mails are sent a day?

No answer. It’s NBC’s service now and that information they can choose to be private.

3. What has Rmail been so successful?

It works! Even today there are countless RSS-to-email solutions and I test them regularly and they don’t work reliably. Most of the publishers offering Rmail are bloggers that got frustrated with my competitors.

4. What your take on howRSS is evolving/growing and how long do you

think before it will become a mainstream tool?

RSS is not a tool. It’s a protocol. Very similar to TCP/IP. Most people have no idea what TCP/IP is, but they use it all the time. TCP/IP is the protocol of the Internet. The same is true and will become more true with RSS. Everybody is using it, but they simply don’t know that they are. For instance, I submit my blog to Google and Yahoo! search using RSS. When a user finds my article on Sidney Crosby in Google, they don’t know that RSS was involved

5. How did the deal with NBCU happen?

It involved a torture machine. That’s all I’m allowed to say.

6. Is it going to to make you rich? :)

Nope. I was already rich. I have the greatest wife in the world and she’s given me three great kids. The NBC deal wasn’t about money. I realized that NBC could make Rmail a bigger success than I ever could. But even more, NBC could bring RSS to a wider audience

7. What’s next for you and Rmail?

I’ll continue running Rmail until we can transfer everything to NBC. And if I find any free time, then I’ll finish off resumebay.net.

Update: More coverage of the deal from Workbench.