By David Ponce
Believe it or not, there are still people that do not use email. I’m thinking the 70+ set, though of course there could be others. It could be because of lack of ability, resources, knowledge, or whatever else, but the point is, some of your loved ones could be missing out on something almost everyone is taking for granted. A New York based company strangely called Celery is marketing a device that would allow just about anyone to use email is a most rudimentary form.
To send an email, the “Late or Never Adopter” (as the company calls them) simply hand-writes a letter. They then drop it in Celery’s inbox. This device looks an awful lot like a multi-function printer, and the “inbox” is nothing more than a scanner. The then-scanned letter gets automagically emailed to a preset recipient.
As you can imagine, to receive an email, Celery simply prints it out.
Pricing for the device is between $220 and $260, and includes up to 900 yearly transmissions (or roughly 2.5 a day), though there are no monthly gaps, which means you can go nuts during Christmas, and ignore grandma the rest of the time.
[Celery] Thanks, Kyle!
What do you do about spam and junk mail?
Spam sent to users is blocked using a challenge-response spam filter, linked to the user’s own address book. When the user receives an email from someone he or she doesn’t know, the server sends an email back to the sender asking them to verify that they’re not a spam-bot. This keeps everything as simple as possible for the Celery user. The only special thing he or she need do is make sure to add any mailing lists they join to the address book.
That’s right, Celery works well for the computer challenged. I got one for my mom and she is very pleased. Now her grandchildren email her regularly, and she is able to keep in touch with them in a way that both feel is user-friendly. Both emails and photos are sent back and forth. We all love it!