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'."

Re:Speaking of the post office

[betelgeuse-4]

What about parcel delivery? I'd like to see you download your next computer hardware upgrade off the internet. You might buy it online, but someone has to deliver it.

Re:Speaking of the post office

[Proud like a god]

Actually I was thinking that even if most bills and letters are sent online, they would have less of a burden on their resources for delivering many packages and parcels (as well as the traditional hand-written letter or two), allowing for a very cheap rate and with high reliability.
But it all depends on how much of their income is drawn from bills and letters.

PS. I'm in the UK, dunno if you meant the US PO.

wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm, so I isolated parts of india they have access to (relatively expensive) computers and internet but can't get the postal service running ok?

Re:Speaking of the post office

[magores]

I believe the only reason the US Postal Service exists as it does today is because of the fact that it is part of the government.

Government subsidies are what has kept the Postal Service from adapting. And those same subsidies are what will keep it from dying off.

IMHO, we should NOT want it to die. Some governmental services are actually worthwhile. And, low-cost communication via snail mail is one of those worthwhile services.

Trustability is the key

[toesate]

... 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.

Telegraph?

[FalconZero]

Does anyone else see a stiking similarity with the old telegraph system?

Western Union Did It First

[gregux]

Guys, this is just a modest update of an already existing technology: the telegram.

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?

Re:FAX?

[FalconZero]

Because FAX requires that the recipient have a fax machine, whereas Letter->whatever->Letter can be delivered regardless of what hardware the final recipient has.

Old idea

[ajs318]

The earliest form of electronic communication was the telegraph. A person wishing to send a message would go to the telegraph office and dictate it to a telegraph clerk. The message would be sent by Morse code, one letter at a time, and decoded and written out at the far end. It would then be delivered by a boy on a bicycle.

Apart from using rather more sophisticated electronic devices than a simple telegraph key and sounder, what has really changed? Certainly if anyone was trying to patent this, there might be some prior art under the names of Cooke and Wheatstone.