h a l f b a k e r yThis ain't rocket surgery.
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1. Get a host name like "mail-a-car.com".
Alternatively, be a big brand car manufacturer
who wants to be hip, and already have your brand
as a a host name (e.g., "canyonero.com").
2. Produce license plate holders reading "Send email
to" above, and "@canyonero.com" below.
3. With each license
plate holder you give out,
establish the license plate (and its misspellings)
as a forwarding account to the owner's real
email address.
On the user side, this can be sold as a dating
service, a "how's my driving" service, and a
means of settling other conflicts (e.g., a hip
police person might send you email before towing
you.) I sometimes wish I had a quick,
non-threatening way of saying "hey, your
left brake light is dead."
On the producer side, an email database with
names of car owners with disposable income
would sell well, and it's a way of updating your
image without much of an actual technology investment.
Car-Ma
http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Car-Ma
Other car/communications-related thread. [jutta, Jun 13 2000]
license.com
http://www.halfbake...om/idea/license.com
Very similar 1/2 bakery idea. [egnor, Jun 13 2000]
searchplates.com
http://www.searchplates.com/
Messaging to license plates. Depends on people actually checking in with the site, so it's a bit of a shout in the dark thing. [jutta, Aug 10 2007]
Interesting!
http://www.emailacar.com/
[hippo, Jul 12 2010]
[link]
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If someone wants to buy the domain, I'd be happy to set
the service up.| — | aswartz,
Jun 14 2000, last modified Jun 15 2000 |
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I really like this idea a lot. So much so, that I did just what
aswartz suggested. |
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I've registered mail-a-car.com and done the DNS thing. |
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See my e-mail address in my profile... |
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I really liked this idea at first, but I seem to remember that in some/many(?) states license plate info is available to the public. So what's to prevent a spammer from using a list of plate numbers to send junk email to those who happen to have "mail-a-car" accounts? I don't think I'd sign up if the spam couldn't be prevented. Solve this problem and I think you have a winner. |
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In a few years (hours?), when in-car internet devices and speech recognition are ubiquitous, it could be used not only for the "your brake light's dead" messages, but the "Sorry, I didn't see you," and "Move over, my wife's in labor" messages between cars in real time. |
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Spam is a way of life. You're never going to get away from spam email, so this should not be a deterrent. The more signficant problems are the security of the database that maps plate addresses to real addreses (privacy), and the maintenance that comes with people changing addresses, buying new cars etc. |
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Maintaining the quality of the data in the db would be a not so small job. |
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This service already exists in the Netherlands for at least
a year. The URL is http://www.license2mail.com/ |
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It works like this. You buy the sticker for f16,- and
subscribe to the service. Through their website you can
e-mail the owner by entering his licenseplate number. |
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Checkout: www.ragemail.net |
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Based in the US, free service, send email to a license plate. If you want to get notifications register your plate. Seems pretty cool. Atleast they're not charging subscriptions for something so trivial.
-jimbob |
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Stumbled across this older idea... It's still not bad, but it looks like [tomierna] hasn't done much with mail-a-car.com... |
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I did this to my own plate a year ago. Nothing. |
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I think this title should be "Mail-TO-a-car.com", because when I saw it I thought it was about sending cars through the mail. |
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