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CIPS Peddles Registered E-mail

The Cayman Islands Post Service (CIPS), which serves the clutch of three storm-tossed Caribbean islands whose main business – other than tourism – is finance, has gone into the registered e-mail business on the back of RPost, the registered e-mail purveyor.

It is competing against the express mail and international private couriers that service the offshore banks, mutual funds, legal firms, insurance concerns, trusts, vessel registrars and partnerships that do business there and produce a heavy amount of mail traffic.

It is the first postal agency to take up with RPost.
Under a multi-year agreement CIPS is offering Rpost’s Registered E-mail service to its 68,000 corporate customers, including some 500-odd banks, 800 insurers and 5,000 mutual funds at a price way below what they’re accustomed to paying for messengers.

A Registered E-mail costs one Cayman Island dollar, roughly 80 cents, according to RPost CEO Zafar Khan, as opposed to the $18-$30 traditional couriers cost depending on weight and destination.

The CIPS offering includes expanded RPost services; a simple Registered E-mail without any volume discounts runs about 40 cents. But CIPS and RPost have bundled the cost of e-mail
proof of delivery, time stamping, encrypting, PDF conversion, information leak prevention via metadata scrub, e-contracting and e-signing, so CIPS customers can send international business
correspondence such as contracts via e-mail to any Internet address, all legal, binding and enforceable.

RPost also provides other services such as client record management, compliance and e-discovery while reducing paper. RPost has just added a new Post-it-style service called SideNote that allows senders to include private notes on Registered E-mail messages that are visible only to cc and bcc
recipients.

The company says it’s an e-mail first and has a patent pending. It has yet to whittle the widgetry down more discretely than all the cc and/or all the bcc recipients, but it is a form of private or sensitive communication along with general group communication and is meant to eliminate the need to forward multiple copies of the same or new e-mail to various parties.

RPost says the scheme is meant to reduce the e-mail flood in which most of us are drowning and quotes the Radicati Group’s finding that the average corporate e-mail user gets 126 e-mail a
day – and that was in 2006. It has doubtless gotten worse.

The SideNote facility appears as an option when a user hits the “Send Registered” button on his toolbar. He types in a message and hits send. The primary recipient sees only the original message and not the special annotated side message. The cc or bcc recipients get the same message but see the separate SideNote message above the original message.

SideNote is fully integrated into the base Registered E-mail service at no extra charge.

Other RPost customers include Pitney Bowes, Postini, now a Google property, Symantec, AT&T, FranceTel’s Orange and BTInfonet. The service is currently available in seven languages.