Canada Post (Score 1)

I am a developer for NetDelivery the company that has built this system. Some of the info here is reasonably acurate. Basically the system uses a Web Browser to deliver Email over a 128 bit encryted conection. The main use for this system is to allow companies to send bills to their customers and to recieve payments eletronically. This is reffered to as EBPP (Eletronic Bill Presentment and Payment). Some of the components for doing this already exist. I have used eletronic banking in the past. I works great when the party recieving your payment is able to recieve the payment electronically. This is the case for large billers like utilities. When the party recieving the payment is not able to recieve it eletronically the bank actually prints a check and mails it. The problem with this approach is the the "reply coupon" that was in your statement is not returned with the bank generated check. The payment goes into an exception bin and may often stay there long enough that your payment is late. The system we are building will accept bills and return payments to the billers eletronically. The main benfit to billers is the expense saved in printing, and mailing out going bills and recieving, opening, and posting incoming payments. The main benefit to the end user is being able to recieve all your bills from a single website and pay them eletronically. The end user will not be charged for the service (as far as I am aware). The cost will be payed by the billers that use the system. The cost should be far lower than the cost of the current paper based system. The cost of printing, mailing, recieving, and posting payments using a paper based system is about $1.50 to $2.00. For a cable TV and water companies where bills are generally small, this is a huge portion their expenses. (of course I would not hold my breath waiting for them to lower the rates when this is adopted) Users of the system will be able to use it to send Email to other users. Because of the encrytion technology being used it will be more secure than sending a regular non-encypted Email. It may not allow the total privacy of a product like PGP since only the internet conection is actually encypted. Although security is a major priority of Canada Post it is concievable that a mail server could be hacked. It happened recently to AT&T with their HotMail servers. The USPS (United States Postal Service) is also looking to start doing this.