The mail must get through!

Security and deliverability were big issues back in the mid 1800’s when Pony Express riders made perilous journeys across the United States to deliver the mail.

Today email has become the preferred method of sending critical business communications like bills, statements, renewals, and other notifications. But email has its challenges, like overflowing inboxes, spam and deliverability and security issues that can’t be ignored. In this blog I discuss the past, the rise of email, and if there is an obvious replacement for email as a delivery mechanism.?

The world before email

In 1838 Englishman Rowland Hill came up with the idea of applying a stamp to letters to indicate the cost of postage had been paid by the sender. Until then, postage costs were paid for by the recipient of the letter.

On 1 May 1840, the Penny Black, the first adhesive postage stamp, was issued in the United Kingdom. Within three years postage stamps were introduced in Switzerland and Brazil, a little later in the United States, and by 1860, they were in 90 countries around the world.

At its peak in 2009, New Zealand Post was delivering over one billion items of mail. Today that number is less than three hundred million and mail volumes continue to decline at a rapid pace. In part because of postage rate increases (sender driven) as well as email and online app preferences, which are now heavily receiver driven.

The history of email

The shift to email has been happening steadily for the past 10 to 15 years. Banks and some other providers have chosen to go down the portal path, such as internet banking - but whilst app use is growing overall, there is now a growing level of apps resistance in some segments, which is only overcome when there are compelling user benefits.

The very first version of what would become known as email, was invented in?1965?at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as part of the university's Compatible Time-Sharing System, which allowed users to share files and messages on a central disk, logging in from remote terminals.

In 1971 the first?network mail was sent, introducing the now-familiar address syntax with the '@' symbol designating the user's system address. Over the years,?conventions were refined for sending mail messages based on?File Transfer Protocol. Several other email networks developed in the 1970s and expanded subsequently.

The?Simple Mail Transfer Protocol?(SMTP) protocol was implemented in 1983.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were endless debates about the final operating system for email. However, the internet community finally developed two further standards, the Post Office Protocol (POP) and the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), in 1984 and 1988, respectively. POP and IMAP enabled connections with remote e-mail servers that contained users’ mailboxes.

The introduction of the Domain Name System?(DNS) occurred in 1985. An often-used analogy to explain DNS is that it serves as the?phone book for the internet by translating human-friendly computer?hostnames into IP addresses.

Today’s business email sender needs be aware of the raft of email security features that must be accommodated, if businesses want to maximise delivery rates and be seen as a “safe sender.” These include adopting the SPF, DKIM and DMARC standards.

But just like the Pony Express rider, there are numerous other factors to understand if your important mail items are to get through. Like understanding the Email Service Provider (ESP) landscape and the benefits of “throttling” bulk email sends. How to avoid blacklisting and dealing with default to alternative delivery processes for undelivered items are also important considerations.

We just accepted that postal mail would get through, and it did for 99.9% of all mailed items. But how do you achieve the same delivery rate with email? This premise is the very reason why Cumulo9 has become the major provider of essential email services in the New Zealand market, with a 99% delivery guarantee and an audited 99.5 % delivery rate.

Over the past 15 years, we have become a bit like the most reliable “Postie” or the most experienced Pony Express rider, knowing how to navigate the fastest and most secure delivery route.

What’s coming next?

Surely, there must be another technology breakthrough just around the corner.

There are existing alternatives to email sending for essential communications, like push notifications or SMS’s that might contain links to stored content. There are the likes of internet banking apps where consumers “pull” rather than receive “pushed” communications, but both models have limitations. Even the banks are now starting to adopt email for the likes of credit card statements, where there are critical payment requirements.

There is a view that we will move to a model where consumers give permission for enterprises to send notifications directly from their systems into consumers drives (i.e.) their core desktop applications like OneDrive. SaaS based applications like Microsoft 365 certainly open the door for this type of transaction.

As we move ever-faster into a paperless cloud-based, device connected world, having the convenience of billers and other businesses delivering their documents into a consumers preferred desktop location (i.e.) a folder called This Month’s Bills, Accounts to Pay, or Household Expenses might catch on. But then someone like Rowland Hill (the adhesive postage stamp guy), or another team (like those who invented email at MIT back in 1964) might come along and we could see a completely new technology arise.

The current thinking is that email as we currently know it, will be around for a long time to come. Consequently, if you are a business sending out lots of essential emails, I would suggest that you focus on deliverability, not the cost of sending, as “emails not getting through” costs a whole lot more in the long run.?

Email senders are not equal?????????????????????????????????

It is the very reason only the best Pony Express riders were trusted with those special parcels and communications back in the 1800’s.?

About the writer

David Allen works for Cumulo9 a customer communications business that provides essential email services to businesses.

David has a background in the CCM (Customer Communications Management) market, going back over thirty years. He was one of the founders of Datam back in 1988, a business that remains the leading mailhouse operation in the New Zealand market. David ended up running Enterprise Solutions at NZ Post and then acquired Kinetic Digital, a boutique DM focused business, which was eventually absorbed into the Blue Star Group.?