Slashdot Mirror
E-mail and Snail Mail United
bahree writes "The BBC has an interesting story about how some people living in some of the most inaccessible areas of India are enjoying an improved postal service - thanks to the combining of e-mail with traditional 'snail mail'."
Email and online bill paying must some day put them out of business. I know they had financial difficulties for a while. I bet they will have to adapt in the coming years or die off.
Now we'll really need that virus scan ;)
got sig?
I live in Spain, but do a lot of business in the UK. Important snail mail that arrives to our UK offices is scanned and emailed to me.
Post offices in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh will take a customer's handwritten letter and computer scan it. Then the letter can be e-mailed to remote, high-altitude post-offices in this Himalayan region.
Hrmmm...this technology sounds intriguing. I propose that we name it "fax" (just an arbitrary name that came to my head).
For example, I knew a Pakistani family in London who had relatives in the remote Karakorum region of Gilgit. The only way to get internet there was to use satellites, but this was beyond the means of many. So the London family had to rely solely on snail mail.
Thanks to the sheer inefficiency of both Royal Mail and PAkistani mail, letters took months, yes, months to get to the destination. However, if the messages travelled over wires as far they could, then both the costs and delays could have been reduced significantly.
Nothing to see here
No wonder all our jobs are going to India... their snail-mail is much faster than ours!
... is whot bwings os tugevza tsuzay.
... to this service
It is a prerequisite to presume that the service chain must be driven with trustworthiness. The old folks who are illiterate must trust the messenger, and the sender must assume the delivery chain is trustable.
Imagine a powered-by-human ATM cash machine.
Normal mail has the implicit benefit of sealed delivery, until received by the receipient.
Hey, that's my password you are typing
The concept (handwritten letter->intermediary format->printed copy) reminds me of V-Mail in World War Two. People states-side would write a letter to their man in uniform on a special form. This form would be printed on microfilm, and carried over to Europe or the Pacific. The letters would be printed and handed out to the troops.
The advantage was that the mail took up significantly less weight. 150,000 letters could be reduced from 2,500 lbs to around 45 lbs. The space savings could be used for war material.
Does anyone else see a stiking similarity with the old telegraph system?
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
Watch any western movie. Somewhere in it someone will want to send a message to someone else who is far away. The first guy will go to the local telegraph office and dictate his message to the clerk. Clerk hands message to the telegraph operator who keys it into the system in a binary-like format. Message travels via wire to remote telegraph office where second telegraph operator decodes the incoming signal and transcribes it. Hard copy of message is then delivered to recipient. Later improvements allowed for messages to be keyed-in and printed without human interpretation.
No news here. Couldn't system resources be better used watching for SCO's latest folly?
The three most important words in a relationship are "I love you." The two most important are "Humor me."
Federal Express CEO Fred Smith made a huge investment in FAX over a private satellite network called Zapmail. The idea being they could do better than next day delivery by getting documents there in the next few hours.
Unfortunately for them high-speed FAX machines using dial-up phone lines became cheap and common and ZapMail was abandoned in a year.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
And you guessed it, the return address was the customer's e-mail address. The note compained how their e-mail was not working.