If the answer to some or all of those questions is "Yes," then you might be interested in the new paradigm that John Halloran has to offer. It's called Woomail, and Halloran promises that it will put control over online communications in the hands of users.

Woomail is a Web-based e-mail client that's free for noncommercial users. From the perspective of a message sender, the interface is not that different from Gmail. But things get interesting when you send a message to someone outside the Woomail system: The recipient gets an e-mail saying, "I only read secure e-mail" and a link that takes the recipient to a reply page on the Woomail server , so that no part of the communication travels through cyberspace.

Putting Users in Control

John Halloran, a Puerto Rico-based precious-metals dealer, created Woomail after struggling with the huge amount of spam his brokers and office staff were dealing with. He said that his goal was to put users in charge of their communications, inbound and outbound.

"The problem was that anyone in the world can send you communication from anywhere, and I can't stop them from sending it to my servers," he said. "If I can get them to come to me by typing in a URL or Woo to Woo message, then I can control communications on my server and so I can prevent fraudulent use." (A "Woo to Woo" message is one in which both parties have Woomail accounts.) Sending a message from within the site cannot be done without a challenge-and-response question, putting the kibosh on automated spammers.

Halloran thinks the real benefit will be to corporate users. The enterprise version would be the Woomail platform on the company's server without any Woomail brand. The version for smaller businesses would let companies put a form on a Web site that would connect to the Woomail server for delivery. Since the form is not associated with a particular e-mail address, there's no possibility of spam. The enterprise version costs $28,000, while the smaller version is $6.95 per user inbox.

Security and Privacy

Halloran said security is paramount, and every page of the Woomail site uses 256-bit encryption, with each message authenticated and encrypted. Since Woomail includes a collaboration tool, projects would have a secure space to share documents and communicate.

Woomail also offers merchant keys that allow a user to assign a specific e-mail address for communication with that vendor. "When an incoming message comes in, the Woomail system would check for that vendor's domain name and check the body of the message to make sure the domain name is listed in there. If it's not, it'll give you an alert and allow you to delete that key," Halloran said. So if you buy from an online vendor and it sells your e-mail address to another company, you can easily revoke that key so future e-mails will be blocked. Those keys can be set to expire in a given amount of time.

Halloran hopes big companies see the value of the new model. "The thing that corporations won't be able to resist is that in the enterprise version, I could go to a large company and tell them they're going to be able to control 100 percent of the communications on their server with zero spam and zero virus possibility. You're controlling both ends of the transaction," he said.