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If anything is guaranteed to make me angry, it's not being able to read my email. I know it's a bad habit, but I can control it, honest. I don't get the withdrawal shakes nearly so bad these days.

But my blood boiled when trying to read my email via Outlook Web Access. Everything loaded fine, except for that ever-so-slightly important message area. I tried a different browser, flushed the cache, deleted cookies, rebooted, started swearing and nearly threw the tablet PC across the room. Then I remembered that some web proxy servers screwed up this way some years ago. And since I was connected using the Vodafone 3G datacard, maybe Vodafone was forcing a so-called 'transparent proxy server' into my connection. A quick reconnection via HTTPS confirmed it.

I mentioned this to a friend, and he quickly directed me to Vodafone's Content Control web filtering. Vodafone filters out, by default, a long list of websites that are deemed to be 'adult' in nature. A dig around its website showed that, 'We believe that while the broadest range of legal content should be available, it is important to protect young people from exposure to adult services. We call these services 18 rated; they include pornography or erotica, gambling and betting, violent games, chat and dating. We now have in place barring and filtering mechanisms, called Content Control, and you have to prove that you are 18 or over to have the content control bar lifted.'

This is all fine and good, but it broke my email server! That it's on by default, and that you have to prove you're over 18 to get it turned off, will no

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doubt come as a surprise to those corporates that are buying this service for their workers. I spoke to one such company, a client in London, and was told that all its communication was via a VPN tunnel back to the main office so no-one had come across the problem so far.

So, while finishing my coffee, I trundled over to the web discussion forum for the Aston Martin Owners Club. Oh dear, this was blocked too - ezboards.com in the USA, where the forum is currently held, must be some sort of den of vice in Vodafone's eyes. I tried Internet Relay Chat, and that connected straight away to Demon's IRC server. How bizarre - Vodafone is ignoring port 6667 and all of the nastiness that exists on IRC.

This got me thinking. For a long time, I've been of the opinion that ISPs should be offering filtering as a value-added service. The Net is a nasty place, so you have to have some sort of firewall to protect you.

While I have no problem with the blocking of some websites and other types of content, is this really the sort of solution we're looking for? Given the rise in Internet worms, malware, viruses and other sorts of nastiness, surely we want a full service that looks at all information types, and all ports, not just the usual ones? Yet the main ISPs just don't want to know. It's easy to block a few headline 'naughty' websites, but that's not really the sort of protection we need.

Any solution that's invisible and hidden away in the depths of the vendor's website, and which can only be turned on or off by making a fuss, isn't good enough. I want a solution from my ISP whereby my connection to the Internet is via an encrypted VPN tunnel to its data centre. The first web page I should see is one that allows me to control the traffic that flows up and down that VPN tunnel. And that means not only which ports are open and in which direction, but all the content filtering I might want to apply. Not just web-page filtering, but email anti-spam and anti-virus too. Oh, and a complete suite of application-level controls. Don't give me a checkbox next to something saying Port 3389. I want to know that a given port is for IRC, another for Yahoo! Chat and so forth.