The company is founded, funded and headed by Phil Goldman, whose previous ventures include WebTV Networks Inc, which was sold to Microsoft was $425m in 1997. Goldman thinks the big three web email services are poor quality.

There’s not much of a business model there, they believe, he told ComputerWire. Their email sites are loss leaders used to advertise their portals. Mailblocks will charge $9.95 per year, with a launch offer of three years for the price of one.

Users are fed up with slow, graphics-intensive services that behave more like web sites than applications, Goldman contends. They also dislike the low storage allowances they offer, and the small permitted attachment size. But most of all they hate spam.

Mailblocks, Goldman said, will be 100% spam-free. The service has a challenge-response mechanism that stops email being delivered to Mailblocks users until the first-time sender has verified their sentience by reading numbers from an image and typing them into a form.

It’s sort of like a reverse Turing test, proving you’re a person and not a computer, Goldman said.

He admitted the system does not distinguish between the ‘bad’ computers used by spammers and the ‘good’ computers used by, for example, e-commerce sites and mailing list servers. But there are a couple of mechanisms that allow white-lists or aliases to be created that could help avoid these kinds of false positives.

While Goldman says Mailblocks wants to be the Google of email – challenging the industry incumbents with a clean, functional, differentiated alternative – whether the service is currently unique enough to pose a significant challenge to the considerable mind-share held by the Hotmail and Yahoo is debatable.

Yahoo and Hotmail both have premium offerings that give users more storage and allow bigger attachments, but they cost up to twice as much as Mailblocks. They also have started implementing spam-filtering features, with various degrees of effectiveness.

But Goldman said the company is patient, with no venture capitalists lighting fires under its collective behind. Mailblocks will advertise on the web, and also hopes to gain popularity the same way Google did, by word of mouth.

The market for email is already very large, he said. But it’s also still growing very quickly.

Source: Computerwire