Valley Forge Mailboxes Blog, Valley Forge PA

Registered Mail vs Secure Email via Opolis

We tried both in a real case study: Sending a registered mail via EMS from Vienna to Bahrain for EUR 45 and sending the same document via Opolis Secure Mail for free. – What a difference and experience!

The letter was posted at a Vienna post office on 6 July at 10.00 and – as we could see on the EMS website – had reached EMS distribution center in Vienna by 19.00 that day. Despite an indication that such shipment would take approximately 3 days to Bahrain we got worried that the status of our letter had not changed by 14 July – more than a full week after posting it. In an admittedly swift response upon our request by EMS we were told that the EMS partner in the Middle East had changed its mail identification system, so that our letter could actually not be tracked. However, the document – we were told – had been delivered on 11 July, 5 days after posting it.

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Sending the same document for free with Opolis Secure Mail merely requires that both, the sender and the recipient, are Opolis users. The registration process – whereby a valid email address is submitted as identification – takes approximately 5 minutes. The rest works like any other standard email: The document is attached and the message simply sent.

However, the main difference between standard email and Opolis Secure Mail (http://www.opolis.eu) is the following: Both, the message and the attached document are point-to-point (sender-to-recipient) encrypted and cannot be read by anyone else. Opolis emails are sent immediately, without delay. And, the sender can monitor and follow the entire path of a message and therefore sees immediately if and when the recipient has opened the mail and the attached document.

Opolis also includes other valuable features, such as:  The sender has always full authority over how the recipient can further process a message. Therefore, the sender decides whether the recipient may copy, print, respond to or forward a message or not. And, there is a limit of 125MB (way more than the usual 10-15MB with standard email) to attachment size which should easily meet current customer demands.

Hence, there are alternatives to sending registered letters, a time consuming and – admittedly – expensive exercise. Secure email and document messaging service, such as Opolis, is one of them.