Are you bugged by spam? Plagued by e-mail-borne viruses? Annoyed when an online merchant sells your e-mail address to e-marketers? Worried about the safety measure of your messages?

whether the reply to some or all of those questions is “Yes,” next 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 by 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 letter sender, the interface is not that different from Gmail. But things get interesting when you send a knowledge 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 told NewsFactor 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 info, soon after I can control communications on my server and so I can prevent bogus use.” (A “Woo to Woo” note is one in which both parties have Woomail accounts.) Sending a note 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…

Orginal post by Top Tech News