Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Move to e-mail for business letters

Many government agencies and business organizations continue to rely on physical mails for their transactions. Each day, we receive a lot of mail from these organizations. They come with stacks of junk mail from marketing organizations. It is quite difficult to sort out the genuine mail from the marketing mail. 

There is the possibility of using the Internet to send out business mail, instead of physical mail. It can be sent to an e-mail address of the customer. But, many organizations are reluctant to do so. Even those that are willing to take this step have to contact their customers individually to get their consent. This is too troublesome.

It would be nice if the customer can register their NRIC and email address, and that all business organisations can refer to this register to send their business letters in soft copy to this e-mail address. But, there is no law that make this possible, and no government agency (e.g. M of Communications, IDA or Ministry of Law) is willing to take the lead.  As a results, we continue to over-rely on sending of physical letters to the homes.

See the stack of mail that I receive every few days. It is troublesome to handle these mail, especially when they come together with the junk mail. I have often overlook some of the important mail, due to this outmoded form of communication.


3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Mr Tan,

For me, I found this to be a form of nusiance and consider it as some form of harassment by the unwanted papers or emails done by these companies in the name of advertising or promoting their products/ services. Maybe we have some sort of register or directory for those who are interested to know and another for those who do not want to be disturbed.

Tan Kin Lian said...

Apart from being a nuisance (which I agree), the advertising flyers represent a big waste of resources. They have to be printed, distributed and torn away (without being read). We have to protect our environment from the wantom waste.

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