At 11:50 AM 12/13/2002 -0500, R. A. Hettinga wrote:

...It had to happen sooner or later, I suppose... --- begin forwarded text

From: <exchanges@seagold.net> Subject: [e-gold-list] Announcing Seagold.net: E-mail Privacy, Secure, Encrypted, accepts e-gold ... Introducing Seagold.net, a secure web-based email service located in the Principality of Sealand, outside the jurisdiction of any government on earth!

... followed by some description of their email system and a long complex description of their shell game \\\\\\ multi- level pyramid scheme\\\\\\\\\ silly sales rep recruiting system.* If you poke around their site a bit, you'll see a reference to http://sealand.pmmit.com/seamail.html which appears to be a straightforward mail system without the shell game, though I haven't done a feature-by-feature comparison to be sure if it's quite identical. It's basically webmail plus SSL-encrypted POP3. The price ranges from $10/month to $90/year depending on contract length, vs. $25/month for the pyramid game, which offers the possibility of being free or letting you make gazillions of dollars if you can find a way to convince the untapped potential customer base to play the game instead of just buying the service. It strikes me as a bit short on features, but then I'm comparing it to fastmail.fm, which is an extremely well-run email system that my wife uses (which ranges from free accounts with signature tags to cheap accounts without them to full-featured accounts for $20-40/year.) There's no encryption, but their spam-avoidance features are the best I've seen. * Don't get me wrong - I'm not totally dissing well-designed pyramid marketing as a sales-rep recruitment technique, but it has to be something that has a product that's realistic at a price that's realistic with margins that are realistic, while these guys seem to have a margin that's unrealistic (at least compared to other services they're offering) with a total hand-waving shell-game compensation method, and other than the fact that their system is based in Sealand, which is worth paying some margin for, and open-source based, which says it has some chance of stability if administered well, they don't say anything that inspires me to expect them to be competent at running email systems well. But hey, free trials can be fun sometimes, though this one requires an e-gold account number, which makes it harder to burn lots of them.