Slashdot Mirror
Canadian Post Office Moves Online in a Big Way
jeremyw writes "CBC News reports that beginning in November, Canadians will be able to receive mail and pay their bills at an Electronic Post Office. Although it is already possible to pay bills through many banks online, this is a new level of integration and convenience. I think this is an excellent example of an organization "reinventing" itself in order to survive and remain relevant in the near future."
How is this going to work? Is the mail scanned into some sort of pdf or bitmap type format, then sent to your e-mail? That's the only thing I can think of, and it's wrong for so many reasons I'm not sure where to start... Maybe it will only work for messages sent online, which makes it no different from e-mail, or a hundred other services and protocols.
I see a lot of similarities between this new "Electronic Post Office" and AOL...
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1) Proprietary service...in order to get full benefits of all the features, you need to send or receive mail from other EPO customers.
2) Real world interaction...AOL used to have an option (I don't know if it still works) where an e-mail could be sent snail mail or faxed to the real world for an additional fee.
3) Online banking...looks like you link this thing up to your bank account, hide behind 128 bit encryption, and let EPO suck money out and send checks to creditors. Already available from most major banks ay keywords like: Wells Fargo
The only major difference is that they promise "no data mining" while everyone knows that AOL will sell every scrap of information they have on you. Maybe the EPO is government funded thus not dependant on advertising revenue?
Don't impress me at all. Yet another site that requires you to commit everything to get the major benefits.
Just my impression after briefly flipping through their "Tour".
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Okay. First and foremost, I'm just a tad bit confused. Is the only method of online mail delivery related strictly to bills/payments? or does it extend to normal mail. I thought the article rather vague.
If they ARE truly thinking about delivering mail online, then how are they going to get mail online is probably the biggest question. If it's sent online, then it's really no different than email already in place. However, if it is scanned and then sent to the receiver, then that has to be a HUGE breach of privacy. In order for someone to scan, then they must first open right? (Or did I miss an article on how to NOT open mail before reading?)
Also, just out of curiosity, how exactly ARE Canadian residents going to be punished for late payments if the server goes down. Given the proper scenario (ie, server goes down for a week due to Hurricane Gates, and bill was sent online to begin with), then the user positively COULDN'T pay the bill on time, through no fault of their own. I dunno, just seems a little sketchy to me. Not enough paper trail for government work I guess.
-I9mm-
My thought exactly.
How does CanPost figure that this will solve their 'people no longer pay their bills through the mail' problem? I mean, I myself, and many of my cow-orkers, already pay our bills online.
All of the major banks in Canada have online/web banking for little or no cost (compared to price of stamp or service fee to pay at a branch).
Heck, most people don't even get their Social Benefits and tax rebate/refund cheques mail to them any more. It's all automagically deposited into their account.
Even on a person-to-person level some banks (i.e. TD Bank) even let you transfer money from your account directly into another person's account online.
If the average person is techno-brave enough to try CanPost's new offerings, wouldn't they rather be doing that through their bank or trust co anyway?
Just face it, as far as cheques and bills goes, CanPost's days are numbered. I guess it's eventually going to be just bulk packages that doesn't have to be there RSN, and personal hand-scribed letters left for them.
And, of course, they still have the snail-SPAM market, AKA junkmail.
Basically everyone has noticed that this service doesn't have any advantages over using the services of your bank and email that you have now.
I have to agree except for 2 minor issues that I don't think are very relevant.
1. They offer a system where there is a return receipt on the email so that you KNOW for sure that someone has looked at it.
2. It is a way for people without bank account access to pay their bills online. May be cheaper than your bank if you get charged a fee for paying your bills.
Some other things I noticed about the service. I briefly checked out their legal agreement and it struck me as being fair to both parties. A rare thing in the age of blanket disclaimers that disclaim responsibility for any and all blame.
I was also wondering how long it might be until they try to get Revenue Canada (Our IRS department) to let them have people file their returns online. That might be nice. I just found out this year that I could pay my tax bill online through my bank. The only time I ever pull my printer out of storage is to print returns once a year.
They probably have other plans, exclusive content and junk like that for the future too.
"If you can't explain what it does in one sentence, it will fail."
I have read the linked article and looked through the epost.ca site, and I can't honestly say I'm much the wiser. The site hits you with page after page of "EPO will change the way Canadians communicate" but doesn't seem too keen to be tied down to exactly why that would be so.
For example, click on the "What does EPO do?" link. Sounds like a helpful one, yes? "EPO puts all your mail in one place" it tells you. "No more going from Web site to Web site to pay bills, view account details and get information. Now it comes to you in your private, secure, Electronic Post Office Box". That certainly makes it much clearer, doesn't it?
Then there's the promising-sounding "Frequently Asked Questions" link. You might expect this to answer the questions people seem to be asking here on Slashdot; questions like "Will I still get paper mail or will it be scanned in?" But instead the FAQ link gives you a huge and utterly uninteresting page full of reassurances about Y2K compliance. And only Y2K compliance; "our code-remediation strategy includes a logic-based solution known as windowing for interfaces to external partners." It will no doubt reassure Canadian taxpayers that this service, being launched as it is in late 1999, considers Y2K compliance to be "achievable". Whoopie-doo.
Anyway, here's the Andrew Crawford Patent No-Crap Distilled and Filtered Guide to the Canadian Electronic Post Office. FX: Fanfare
So what's new here? Nothing really. It's a proprietary secure email system. The key to its success will be whether they get enough companies signed up to use it. Even then, they've failed to show any overwhelming reason why it's better than the existing email infrastructure.
I think they're making a mistake hyping it as a replacement for paper mail when it's really not. Such merit as it has consists in making life a little easier for people who already use the Internet to check their balances etc and pay their bills by centralising everything. There aren't a huge number of people who actually do that though - and those that there are often do so because they appreciate the interactive features of being connected directly to the company's database. (Want to transfer a balance from one account to another? Or see more details of this transaction? Just click.) This kind of feature will be absent from EPO.
But I don't think it will succeed, because the people marketing it don't seem to have any idea what it actually does.
Seems to me this is yet another portal web site, but run by a government.
Like all portals, it could be good or bad, depending on how useful, secure, private, and reliable its services are. Off hand, I don't think this one is that bad, and they could distinguish themselves by being completely non-commercial. No ads, no plugs, no links sold to the highest bidder.
What Canada Post is doing is "interesting"--authenticated email, hard traces, government backing--what we've yet to see is if they'll do it right. This is one of the first major deployments of a government-backed end-user market infrastructure, and its successes and difficulties will end up studied for quite some time.
However, while it borrows the imprimateur of the government, I'm not sure how much it actually exploits the vast resources governments as a whole spawn, and postal services in particular require.
The moment I read this story, I imagined that Canada Post might be facilitating convenient and efficient person to person transactions. Checks and money orders are incredibly inefficient, and the annoyance of compounded delays that permeate Online Auctions such as Ebay(send slip of paper, wait for slip of paper to arrive, wait for slip of paper to be converted to slips of paper redeemable anywhere for goods, wait for product to be mailed in response, hope nothing goes wrong) are just waiting for an efficient infrastructure to replace them--preferably one that could grow and deploy at the same impressive rate everything else online has sprouted.
I'm not expecting miracles. But postal services already support much of the (arguably inefficient, but definitely interesting) mass point-to-point package distribution system that's keeping Ebay in business. Through money orders, they're already directly involved in the actual exchanging of currency. Even the much maligned(and extraordinarily expensive) C.O.D. Delivery remains a strong historical precursor to what we're going to see the delivery person become.
As more transactions occur online, many of the functions the cashier once performed(everything from synchronizing the deal to acting as a buffer between management and the customer) will become shunted effectively into the delivery architecture. Deals agreed to via a Canada-post style secure email trail will have transactional paths drawn directly from one private citizen account to anothers--no cash to demand; your signature for delivery becomes your signature validating your willingness to pay.
Escrowed delivery and rock-solid paper trails are things that any of the major delivery providers can provide(and almost certainly will try), but I honestly think that government post has a serious advantage in this market--when it comes to designing systems that meet legal standards, being part of the organization that wrote those standards is both a PR coup and a legal benefit.
Of course, there are many, many issues I've glossed over, but I'd like to hear what others have to say about this.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com