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I'm referring of course, to the way that email has begun to hammer the old fashioned ink, paper, envelope and stamp world of traditional mail.

NZ Post has announced that it will be hiking the price of sending a regular letter from 40 cents to 45.

One of the justifications for this increase is the way that email has caused a reduction in the volumes of letters, and I have a strong suspicion that it won't be long before the pain at NZ Post intensifies further.

To be fair though, 45 cents to send a letter anywhere in the country is still a very fair price and I'm not going to suggest for one moment that the price rise isn't justified.

In fact, I marvel that they can actually carry and deliver a letter from Kaitaia to Bluff and deliver it to the recipients mailbox for such a modest fee -- while still turning a handsome profit.

But how long will it before the good old letter becomes as common as carbon-paper, horseshoes and buttoned flies on trousers?

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Let's face it -- email is quicker, simpler, cheaper and these days, every bit as ubiquitous as the postal service.

Despite being reminded regularly that email isn't guaranteed 100 percent reliable, I generally find that it's as good as the post and if I get the name wrong or, for whatever reason, the message can't be delivered, at least I know about it pretty damned quickly.

On the plus side, hand-written letters are sometimes a whole lot nicer to receive than a cold, clinical collection of ascii characters. Because of this I expect that the post will never die, but I expect it to atrophy quite significantly over the next 4-5 years.

The trend to email is not just affecting personal communications though, some business are already beginning to opt to send electronic copies of invoices and statements in preference to hardcopy. After all, what's the sense in wasting paper, ink and stamps simply to physically transport information (such as an amount owed) when the same thing can be done in the blink of an eye using email.

Even account payments are now being done using electronic banking, so that old standby "the cheque is in the mail" is rapidly becoming redundant.

So what will NZ Post do if/when email hammers the popularity of their postal service even harder?

Well I wouldn't worry too much. While it may appear to be their most public service, NZ Post has far more irons in the fire and it's shown a good ability to innovate when necessary.

Who knows, maybe they'll set up a "certified" email system that offers services such as guaranteed delivery, encryption and funds transfer (like PayPal) to the great unwashed masses.

Sure, these levels of functionality are already available to savvy Net users, but let's not forget that the vast majority of Net users wouldn't have a clue how to use PGP and Outlook's receipt-request facility won't work if the recipient isn't using compatible software so can't be relied on.

If NZ Post added an email-by-post facility -- where your emails could be printed out and physically delivered to a recipient, I think they'd retain a goodly portion of their mail business.

What's more, by charging a per-message fee for such new services, they'd be able to crush the spam problem that may already be the biggest barrier limiting the growth of email today.

Will they do it? Who knows?

No Aardvark Tomorrow
Just a note for Aardvark's international readers -- there'll be no Friday edition because tomorrow is Waitangi Day. This is the country's national day where we're supposed to celebrate our heritage and the growth of the country. Unfortunately it's increasingly becoming a day for political grandstanding and has become more of a sorry reminder that, in many cases, the divide between Maori and non-Maori is growing rather than narrowing thanks to the outrageous actions of politicians who appear more interested in scoring points and chasing votes than taking a long-term approach to addressing some very important issues.

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