Mail - In Any Form?

The inventor of EMAIL in 1980, V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, an MIT professor, now has plans that he says could save billions of dollars for the Postal Service. He suggests they enter the email management industry.

“Large Fortune-2000 companies and small businesses are seeking personnel and solutions every day to manage their growing volumes of email,” Ayyadurai said. In 1994 he won a White House competition  by creating his own email management system called EchoMail.

According to Ayyadurai, large companies lack the infrastructure necessary to efficiently handle the amount of messages that are dumped into their inboxes on a daily basis. Although he developed his own software, Ayyadurai still thinks human eyes are needed to filter through every companies’ incoming emails, separating those marked urgent from spam.

“USPS postal workers, trusted and true, can do this job,” Ayyadurai writes. “They can be trained within 30-60 days, given their current background, to offer a USPS email management service. From simple estimates, the USPS can generate a minimum of $10 billion per year.”

Ayyadurai says he has been working to formulate some sort of plan, and on March 15th, he’ll speak on “The Future of the Post Office” on behalf of the MIT Communications Forum.

http://www.vashiva.com/innovation/email/vashiva-the-history-of-email-vs-usps-snail-mail.asp