Royal Gazette - Bottom Line Magazine

Have you ever sent an e-mail and then wondered whether or not it had arrived? Electronic messaging has made life easier, but, like posting a letter, e-mail provides no certainty that it arrived. For mail, registered post and couriers can provide proof of delivery, at a cost, but for e-mails, the best one can do is to set the e-mail server to ask for a receipt and hope the receiver hasn’t switched off the automatic response system.

Those days are over The Bermuda Post Office now offers receipts for e-mail that act as legal proof of delivery, content and time. The Post Office, which is part of the Ministry of Energy, Telecommunications and E-Com¬merce (METEC), has partnered with RPost, a Bermuda company with offices in Los Angeles and worldwide, to offer registered e-mail services as an official Bermuda postal service to domestic and international businesses and individuals.

The RPost service allows customers to reduce their annual communications costs by offering a viable electronic alternative to high-cost courier and overnight delivery services. RPost has been around for nine years and handles millions of e-mails a year.

Welcoming the new service on its debut in Bermuda this fall, METEC Minister Michael Scott said: “For our business customers who compete on a global scale, we are extending the mailstream to include registered e-mail services that bring far greater agility and speed in conducting their business internationally, with the added benefit of irrefutable proof to protect against common misunderstandings related to e-mail delivery, content or time. We look to expose our local customers to the efficiencies afforded by Bermuda’s electronic transaction laws, with simple-to-use, low cost, and market-leading electronic services.”

The Registered E-mail service is primarily a service to help companies move from paper to electronic transmission of high-value data. It saves money in the short term via a reduction in courier services and postage, and in the long term by reducing exposure and, potentially, legal fees.

Alex Khan, vice president of products and global service delivery for RPost, is based in Boston. He was in Bermuda in mid-November to meet with IT people from some of Bermuda’s largest companies that have signed up to use the system.

“RPost provides the same legal certainty as a signature would on a receipt from a courier,” Mr. Khan said. “Courier receipts, of course, can be signed by a mailroom attendant, an assistant, a receptionist, the doorman or the intended receiver: in law, all constitute delivery. Post has a number of services that can provide further value to the sender above the proof of delivery, content and time afforded by the Registered E-mail service including giving the receiver the ability to prove authorship and the authenticity of the e-mail.”

The service also works in the area of electronic contracting. “You can use your mouse to sign a document or contract, returning what is functionally equivalent to a ‘wet’ signature on a document, eliminating the need to print out a document, sign it and fax back,” Mr. Khan said.

E-mail goes from the sender through the normal mail server or ISP, and then to RPost, which processes the email so that it packages a permanent record of the transmission that is returned to the sender, and delivers the message to the recipient without delay.

This evidentiary record of the e-mail transaction is returned to the sender in the form of a registered receipt e-mail, which constitutes the legal record of who e-mailed what and when. The receipt is returned in a form that can be authenticated with the validated original content and Internet forensic information reconstructed. No one in the process - not RPost, the Bermuda Post Office or anyone else -stores a copy of the contents of e-mails or attachments.

“The analogy I like to use is with the international couriers,” Mr. Khan said. “If I send you a package and you say you didn’t get it~ the easiest way to resolve the dispute is for me to fax a copy of my shipping slip. You can go online and type in the tracking number and would be able to prove that it had been delivered. There would be an audit trail of all the hops it took. With the Registered E-mail service, it’s very similar. If you challenge the e-mail, I can very easily forward you my receipt. You can then go online and verify the receipt with RPost. It allows companies to move from paper to electronic transmission with the same comfort and reliability as an international premium courier service for a fraction of the cost.”

Among RPost’s features:

• Registered e-mail messages sent from Bermuda will have an optional Bermuda Post Office banner on the top. For corporations, that information can be helpful in a variety of ways, such as proving origin of correspondence from Bermuda.

• RPost further provides the option to remove metadata from Microsoft Office attachments to reduce potential exposure to hidden information saved in that file.

• Users have an option to store their registered receipt e-mails in a secure, web-accessible, searchable archive that can be deployed in-house or enabled in a hosted environment by an RPost partner.

• Registered E-mail service is greener than printing documents.

• RPost can reduce mistrust. “What do people do, typically, to cover themselves when sending an e-mail?” Mr Khan asked. “They copy multiple people; they print their sent item; they wait a little while until they know that there’s no ‘bounce back’ notice coming; or they use a ‘read receipt’ feature on their e-mail plug in. Unfortunately, those methods don’t work all the time and many people know that; so, they may shirk their responsibility claiming non-receipt when they really received the email - or they may simply not have received it. There lies the origin of mistrust that one can avoid with the accountability brought by use of the Registered E-mail service. For example, the most common things that we hear when it comes to e-mail, in terms of disputes, is ‘I didn’t get it’ or ‘That’s not what the e-mail said’. Then we hear: ‘That document may be in your archive, but that’s not what you sent me’. An altered copy of an e-mail can be presented as the truth. If you challenge the company’s server logs, how do you verify the authenticity of those logs? They’re just text files.”

To start using RPost, step one is to visit the Bermuda Government website, www.gov.bm. A button on the left-hand side of the home page clicks through to the service. RPost is designed to be similar to postage: it applies per use, rather than per user. The registration service is sold on a monthly plan, like cell phone minutes. Buy a pack with a credit card; start using the service. Over the course of time, the average cost of registered e-mails is less than 60 cents apiece.

Mr Khan was quick to point out that it is not necessary to send all e-mail as Registered E-mail messages. “You download a small program from RPost and we provide a ‘Send Registered’ button,” he explained. “You have a ‘Send’ button for casual e-mail and next to it, a ‘Send Registered’ button for high-value business e-mails, or for whenever you want a record. It’s not for every e-mail, just like registered post is not for every letter.”

E-mail has replaced a considerable amount of what was once the Post Office’s business. By bringing registered mail to the Bermuda ether, the Post Office has shown that it can find new ways to be of service in the internet age.