To Whom It May Concern: Please Stop Intercepting My E-Mails!

The people in the Customer Relations unit of Sri Lanka Telecom/Mobitel promised to look into my complaint and then NEVER got back to me.  If further confirmation of my suspicions was required, a while later, we went through the same sequence of events. Not so much as an acknowledgement of my communication on that occasion, though!  And this was in spite of the fact that both communications were sent under registered cover!

Ah, well, I thought, let us change to another ISP because in any event, without even the interruption of intercepted emails, the service was so poor that I was reduced to travelling to a large town many kilometers away and accessing the internet through a friend’s computer if I had need of it!  Even in the days of the carrier pigeon one would not have been reduced to this kind of “temporary address change” in order to communicate!

Anyway, getting closer to today, I change to Dialog and, before too long, it seems as if my internet communication is headed down the same path.  For instance, a couple of days ago, it took in excess of 12 hours for an email from a fellow newspaper columnist to reach me and then a friend of ours arrives to stop over the night with us and asks what I thought of the newsletter which she sets up for my small business enterprise, sent me from less that 30 miles away earlier in the day. It is now 7:00 a.m of the day following and I still have not received that piece of mail.  Again, I would suggest that all of this effort on the part of whoever is doing this and the aggravation to me and mine could be avoided by checking my website the address of which is available to the whole wide world!

Given my own experience over more than a year it would extremely difficult to dismiss as untrue or a figment of his imagination, Mr. Mangala Samaraweera’s recent statement in the legislature in this connection.  The fact that telecommunications has been moved under the control of the Ministry of Defence relatively recently would also tend to suggest more than a coincidental connection.

Anyway, I have an offer to make to anyone interested in my communication, be they of a personal, political or business nature:  I am prepared to send copies of EVERY email I send and every email I receive from now on to an address of his or her choice.  Would this, at least, help avoid the useless effort on one side of this fence and the needless aggravation on the other?

Now I ask every fair-minded reader of newspapers in this country – and this includes the newspaper owner/publisher who has expressed the opinion that intercepting private correspondence is perfectly kosher – whether this is not an eminently fair and practical proposal? But, “To Whom It May Concern:” would you PLEASE exert your not-inconsiderable power and put a stop to this state of affairs and return my email communication to where it moves faster than a letter by “snail mail” or even a piece of paper tied to the leg of a carrier pigeon? After all, even if I have been known to criticise your benevolent hegemony in the Miracle of Asia, am I not deserving of at least this tiny Royal Boon?

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