Snail mail meets e-mail

Each morning, an assistant in their Tardeo office downloads nearly 800 letters received on their website from all around the globe, obtains printouts and then proceeds to fill them up in envelopes and post them by ordinary mail all over the country.

The two hit upon this idea while doing their Masters in Computer Science in the US nearly a decade ago. “We had already lost the writing habit,since we were so habituated to using our desktops,” Mehta says. They set up Multinet, an internet consultancy firm specialising in seminars and websites in 1996. Online post followed soon after, a panacea for thousands of NRIs who wanted to communicate with their friends and relatives in India.

So homeindia.com/post was launched on the net this February. Its creators had originally planned to charge a small fee, but they shelved the idea. “We decided to give free service since it was difficult to collect small change,” Mehta says. Sabeer Bhatia, NRI and father of the world’s most successful free e-mail service was probably an inspiration.

So how does online post rake in the cash? “We have great advertisement potential on this service and we charge for advertisement banners on our website. Sending advertisements with the letters mailed to India is another possibility,” Mehta says. But for the moment, their service is free and a bit heavy on their pockets. The duo shell out an average of fourrupees a letter, and with 800 messages a day it works out to a neat Rs 32,000. The hiccups, they say, happen purely on the postal side. Like last month’s postal strike, which saw thousands of letters pile up in their office. Or in case of wrong addresses.

For them, the future consists of having online post nodes all over India. “To ease the load on our Mumbai office and speed up delivery of mail,” Mehta adds. They’re readying software for this service which will be extended to other Indian languages. A write-back service, wherein Indians drop letters which are then keyed in and sent via e-mail, is also on the cards. The feedback has been overwhelming, with some relatives even mailing them stamps and letters of thanks.