With these delivery services, companies don't have to toss sensitive information onto the Internet and hope for the best or spend a small fortune to send hard copies of documents via overnight express services. Instead, they can simply send an E-mail message to recipients that links to the encrypted or password-protected document stored on a secure Web site. And in addition to making sure that important information isn't compromised during delivery, these services solve another problem for businesses.

Companies are often frustrated by the lack of business-grade assurances associated with E-mail. For key E-mail, businesses can't rely on Internet-based electronic return receipts. New Jersey's third-largest law firm, Riker, Danzig, Scherer, Hyland & Peretti LLP, is using Microsoft Outlook as its E-mail server, but its return-receipt features won't work outside the law firm due to the nature of E-mail and the Internet.

"You can't enforce E-mail rules outside your own E-mail system," says Gary Link, Riker Danzig's director of IT. But this poses a problem: How does the firm know when, or if, outside partners, clients, and vendors get the E-mail the firm has sent?

"Determining if people have received their E-mail is just as important to us as security," says Link. After looking over several secure E-mail solutions, Link says he chose to implement CertifiedMail.com Inc.'s CertifiedMail Server, which can be installed within companies' firewalls. The CertifiedMail Server is an easy-to-use turnkey system, he says, and protects both the privacy and the integrity of documents and E-mail messages sent by attorneys inside and outside the firm. The server also provides automatic track-ing capabilities to confirm document receipt.

Bob Janacek, Certifiedmail.com's executive VP, predicts secure document delivery will get the stamp of approval from businesses, even though most companies have long been able to use S/MIME or digital certificates to encrypt messages themselves. "Most people found it too cumbersome to activate and use these technologies," Janacek says. "Less than 1% of the population has a personal digital certificate despite the technology being around for 15 years."

In the past year a number of companies have entered the secure E-mail delivery market. One of the first was United Parcel Service of America Inc., which pioneered the concept in early 1998 with UPS Document Exchange services. Others include PostX, Tumbleweed Communications, and Zipmail. One of the latest to enter the market has been the United States Post Office, which in May unveiled PosteCS.

Pricing structure for secure document delivery varies widely. CertifiedMail.com charges a flat $99 annual fee for unlimited use per user for its Web-based service, which is free to individuals. For companies that send more than 1,000 messages a month, UPS charges $1.75 for each message that's trackable and encoded and 60 cents for documents that are only trackable. "We don't have a huge paper-based legacy infrastructure to protect," says CertifiedMail .com's Janacek to explain the disparity. In com-parison, the average cost of sending an invoice, credit-card, or other paper-based statement using regular mail is about $1.25.

Yankee Group analyst Jawad Abassi says the incentive for outsourcing secure E-mail will be a lower cost compared to overnight delivery services, but the growing use of the Internet and the increasing speed of business also play a part. "Businesses are becoming more global, and the Internet compresses time and space," he says. "You can reach your supplier around the globe instantly with these services and even verify if and when they read your message."

Aberdeen Group analyst Jim Hurley says that although secure electronic document delivery services have been around for a couple of years, they're only becoming popular now as some users become more comfortable with the idea of outsourcing security. "Secure document delivery is another form of outsourcing security, just like outsourcing managed firewalls," he says.