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(🇧🇪 Belgium) 📧 The wisdom of email being treated as registered letter (europe.pub)
submitted 4 days ago by ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io to c/Law@europe.pub
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I use very unreliable email forwarding services for protection and control. Rationale:

  • to detect data leaks (every email address I disclose is unique to the recipient)
  • to disable an ephemeral address when it is abused

I pay no fees. My forwarding providers are likely running in some kid’s mom’s basement. Lots of messages get lost. It’s usually the worst kind of a loss: a blackhole. Which means the sender successfully connects and receives a well-sent status. The messages are lost after the sender is left with the false idea that it was delivered. I have no idea if the messages are lost by the forwarding provider or the email server of the ultimate destination.

In one case I discovered that a forwarding provider was silently dropping all messages no matter what email service I use. It’s a gratis service, so the idea of suing or taking action against the shitty provider would be controversial and likely unsuccessful. It could have been happening for months or even years before I discovered it was happening.

Email is inherently unreliable. It is what it is. But at the same time, Belgium has decided that sending an email carries the legal weight of a registered letter. Yikes! Indeed, something officially important for which my attention is critical and has legal consequences has a good chance of going to a black hole without my knowledge.

To worsen matters, the post service charges ~€10 to send a proper registered letter. That extortionate cost sufficiently drives senders to use email instead.

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[–] CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

We haven’t solved the problem of phishing, which makes this a very dangerous scenario.

Email delivery has never been designed to be reliable. It is utterly absurd to suggest email should be a substitute for registered mail, but unfortunately laws aren’t written by technologically competent individuals. Your situation, of course, is one you have created entirely by your choice and typically email delivery is very reliable - but the technological underpinnings absolutely are not.

€10 for a registered mail is not extortionate. It is a reasonable price for the service, which also serves the necessary low barrier that prevents abuse.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 0 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Email delivery has never been designed to be reliable.

Indeed, not inherently. Though it /can/ be reliable only if sent a certain way. Sender emails a “digital notary” service and puts the ultimate destination in a separate header. The digital notary forwards the msg, timestamps it, signs it, and includes the sig of the previously sent transmission (to create a verfiable chain). A service called the UK Timestamper demonstrates this. It proves posting but not reception. There is a RFC (documented open standard) for read receipts whereby the recipient sends a signal when they open the msg. Of course it’s voluntary and relies on a willing recipient.

In the end, Belgium simply declares that a simple email serves as a registered letter.

Your situation, of course, is one you have created entirely by your choice and typically email delivery is very reliable - but the technological underpinnings absolutely are not.

My situation proves how catastrophic it is to presume reliability. I conciously traded off reliability in exchange for privacy (of a certain kind), control, and malice detection. Though I have no way of knowing how much reliability I am trading. Blackholing is borne out of incompetent design. Delivery cannot be guaranteed but a delivery failure should be signaled to one party or the other.

€10 for a registered mail is not extortionate. It is a reasonable price for the service, which also serves the necessary low barrier that prevents abuse.

It’s absurdly extortionate. It first requires prior class. Prior class within Belgium is more than sending prior from Germany to anywhere in the EU. Then they are charging an additional ~€7 just to collect a sig. The postal workers are quick to insert a slip into the mailbox that forces the recipient to go to the post office and wait in line. It’s very streamlined and convenient (for them, not us). In some cases they don’t even bother buzz the doorbell.. just drop off the slip with the rest of the mail.

If DIGI comes around to drill into your façade to add another cable, you then have a legal obligation to send DIGI a registered letter every time you renovate your facade in the area of the cables. If you have 8 cables attached to your house, that’s a cost of ~€80.

There is an easy opportunity here for a company like Deliveroo to expand and undercut them.

[–] CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

complains that email is unreliable and mail is too expensive

wants deliveroo to take over registered mail delivery

Nope. Nope, nope, nope.

If you think €10 is a lot, find out what it costs to serve someone.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 0 points 4 days ago

Nonsense. This is like comparing the price of rice in China to potatoes in Ireland. Process serving is a legal process with liability. Process serving does not allow for dropping a slip in a box and waiting for the served to come to your office and stand in line at the convenience of the process server. Process servers must be resilient to track down a human, who may rarely be home. There is no lax rule of just waiting 2 weeks for the served person to appear and sending it back.

(edit) A registered letter can also be refused. Which amounts to a simple tickbox and returned letter.

BTW, this is not to say process serving is not also overpriced. But process serving /should/ cost much more than registered letter.

(edit 2) Process serving can turn into a man hunt. I’ve seen process servers dig around like private investigators to find out where someone hangs out, in order to track them down and get papers in front of them. And when it all fails, a process server has to publish the circumstance in a local newspaper to then be able to argue in court that the served had an opportunity to become informed that way.