When Facebook announced several months ago that it would soon launch an email service, the media hashed out the implications for email giants like Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail ad nauseam. The competitive threat posed by Reagan Email, meanwhile, has received far less attention.

Reagan Email--the "first conservative email service"--was created by Michael Reagan last April for people who don't want to support the "Obama, Pelosi and Reid liberal agenda" by using the email services of companies like Yahoo, Hotmail, and Google, which, Reagan claims, are "huge supporters financially and with technology of those that are hurting our country." Reagan assures potential customers that the $39.95 annual fee for an @Reagan.com email address will go exclusively to conservative causes.

Less than a year after launching the service, Reagan--the son of former President and conservative icon Ronald Reagan--proudly tells Fast Company's Austin Carr that Reagan Email has 4,000 accounts and could one day--with the help of an investor--compete with the likes of Hotmail or Gmail. The service includes features like a proprietary search engine that shepherds results into Conservative and Liberal columns. Reagan says that he sells three to five accounts per day (or more if he gets to plug it on Sean Hannity's show) and that he'll start offering the service for free once he has a critical mass of users.

He also has a response for all the naysayers out there: "People forget: I was the first one to stream a radio show, and everybody laughed at me. I was the first one in radio with a website, and people laughed at me then."

If Reagan wants conservative email to dominate the market, he certainly has his work cut out for him. Here's a snapshot of the competitive landscape based on Reagan's data and comScore estimates for unique visitors to the country's top email services in December 2010:

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Uri Friedman