Israel Post Rolls Out Email Alerts!

An actual EMAIL from the post? Yes, it’s true. And yes, I registered my address in Aliexpress as ‘Daniel S. Rosehill Esq.’ as a joke and forgot to change it!

Today’s big news — and this blog’s first international exclusive, both in English and Hebrew media — is that Israel Post, that most deservedly pillaged of government service providers, has today officially begun sending out email collection alerts to customers.

I can confirm that in the last five minutes I received both an SMS and an email from [email protected] attesting to the fact that I have a package waiting for me in a nearby smoke-filled makolet (quickie market) that serves as one of Doar Yisrael‘s delivery points.

From a previous exclusive about the sorry state of the country’s new “state of the art” sorting centers

This development, which was unannounced and will likely remain unreported except by this eagle-eyed observer, means that mail customers — after enduring months of torturous waiting for Aliexpress and Amazon packages to arrive — can now know when it’s time for them to dust off their walking shoes and take part in Israel’s unique form of final mile post deliver (having the customer themselves pick up their own mail from a sorting center) without having to leave the comfort of their inbox.


Constant Improvement!


MySMS. I have one less reason to use this nice SMS -> email gateway today.

Satire aside, I am genuinely pleased to learn of this development.

I’ve been using MySms for years as an SMS to email gateway but am still bemused as to why companies continue to use this antiquated communications technology at all.

Doar’s decision to join the email revolution means that customers without such a gateway at their disposal will similarly no longer have to leave their inboxes to learn of their packages’ arrival at the sorting center — or miss notifications when their battery is out, coverage is lacking, or they are abroad without SMS service.

The Rav Kav
The Rav Kav team actually made an Ubuntu client. Full credit to them!

This happy development reminds me of other similarly unanticipated technological advances — such as Egged’s pioneering decision to install Rav Kav (smart travel card) readers at multiple points along city buses, thereby facilitating passenger ingress from all doors and reducing stop times, and the Jerusalem Municipality’s decision to make public visits to Safra Square a queue-only system, thereby greatly reducing average wait times.

As saliently, I witnessed the Rav Kav transform, in the space of a year, from a functional but mediocre national transport card to a technically sophisticated one compatible with multiple card reading technologies including NFC and RFID (the Rav Kav team even built a dedicated Linux program!) — not to mention full interoperability between transport networks.

Upon witnessing a similar transformation of the Rav Kav office in the Jerusalem bus station, which was formerly a dysfunctional and depressing office full of surly shouting mandarins and is now a gleaming renovated office with altogether more helpful staff and streamlined procedures, I was almost moved to tears.

On a serious note, although I have recently posted about the many dysfunctions and deficiencies about living in Israel at great length here, this kind of low-level kaizen (continuous improvement) is something which I witness constantly here.

I don’t claim that other countries are similarly not constantly improving, but something about the pace of change in Israel seems particularly frenetic — in a good way.

Given Israel’s remarkable history thus far, transforming itself from a barren piece of desert into a regional power in less than a century, I have no doubt (and hope and pray) that the litany of issues I elucidated in that piece — the excessive cost of living, the unaffordability of housing, and the dysfunction of many businesses and government services, the post system included — will be resolved sooner than we expect or had anticipated.

Now, if only the postal service would actually deliver my package!