"When I walk into a restaurant I'm Simon Grice, but on the Net who am I?" he asks. (Well, Simon, the answer to that is you are usually an address partly determined by you and partly designated by an ISP.) "Precisely. PEmail provides you with an identity on the Net, an address that's yours for as long as you want it, regardless of which ISP you use now, have used in the past or may use in the future.
The email services are personal: it's your email, it's forwarded to wherever you tell it to go, or you can pick it up from the PEmail Website."
That last bit is key, not just for the personal email customer, but for business users too. How many people carry around a notebook PC, particularly when they go on business trips overseas, just to pick up and reply to email? You don't need one with PEmail. You can dial up the PEmail Website from anywhere, using any device with Web access.
This relies on you having ready access to a Web-enabled computer, of course, which is fine if you're going to spend most of your time away in a high-tech office or a town populated with cybercafes, but not much use if you are reliant on hotel services. ("You want to use a fax machine, Sir? That will be FFr150 - per page.")
But Grice is hoping that the widespread and rapid take-up of the Net will see Web-access terminals set up in public places - stations, airports, libraries, hotel foyers. It's chicken and egg, but demand for services like PEmail's would add to the motive for installing them.
The company is still small enough to be personal too. The full service kicked off on 1 April this year, but there are already over 4,000 users. "We have a personal relationship with our subscribers, for example, we poll them on what they think the service should be called," says Grice. "And the way we've grown so far is through subscribers telling their friends and family how bloody good the service is."