On Tuesday 17th June we will be presenting RealSnailMail at Bournemouth University in the Coyne Lecture Theatre at 2.00pm. We will be discussing the development of the project over the last couple of months in which we have teamed up with Tim Orman & Andrew Watson from The School of Design, Engineering and Computing http://dec.bournemouth.ac.uk/ at Bournemouth University to develop a prototype tank. This tank contains a small community of land snails Helix Aspersa. Each snail is equipped with a small glass capsule attached to its shell. The capsule contains a tiny chip and coil antenna that can be activated by a reader at a range of 3 cm. Andrew Watson is currently developing two purpose built readers that provide a link between the snails and the server allowing the snail to collect and deposit packets of information.
RealSnailMail presentation
June 13, 2008 by vickyisley
I absolutely love this concept! I just read about it on the BBC website. Somewhat fortunately, the news travels faster than snails!
CB
Q: Have the snail mail snails actually sent any mail yet? I see Andrew is developing the readers still….
A: Join NLLR Mixtape Project on Facebook if you are mad about dance, electronica, etc…..
It’s free downloads that keep me awake in between snailed mails!
Great idea, most of us could do with taking our time over things and getting back to enjoying life for what it is.
H’amazing! I love it!
Owen
Thank you for showing, us the bright side of our own technology,
IT was met to server us, but we are it’s slaves,
But you are not so heep it up
Excellent idea. We at Fundeo are training up racing snails which might be a little faster than yours at delivering the messages. Our snails are trained daily so perhaps they could convey the messages a little faster. Please check out our snails they race for charity worldwide and we would be happy to volunteer their services to your exciting new project. See our Race Night Snails at http://www.FunDeo.com
I, too, caught wind of this via BBC News. What a great idea, this could make a cool exhibit at a children’s museum. I also like the look it takes at the immediacy of life as we know it now. I find I don’t have the time (or is it that I don’t make the time?) to just sit down, unplug, and read a book. Real Snail Mail makes me want to do just that. Brilliant, just brilliant.
Hi,
We’ve featured your project on the forums of Instructables.com
We’d love it if you could take the time to let us know exactly how you executed the project.
http://www.instructables.com/community/It-had-to-happen-Real-SnailMail/
Seriously, please do something useful with your lives. This is surely an inexcusable waste of talent, time and money.
I think this is fantastic!
I’ve just sent a snail mail and will be waiting for one back. It’s almost like waiting for the post pre-1995, it lends a certain anticipation to e-mails!
Thank you for doing something with e-mail which actually makes it fun again… and doesn’t invite me to buy Viagra or share my bank details!
As the authors of “One is a snail, Ten is a Crab” (co-authored with my husband Jeff Sayre), we are pleased to learn about your wonderfully intriguing Mollusk Messaging Service (MMS). This is a creative, educational, and artful project.
The UK version of One is a Snail won a WOW! Award from the highly respected National Literacy Association.
I will put a link to your project on the One is a Snail page of my website!
For more information on our book, please visit: http://www.aprilsayre.com/pages%20books/onesnailpage.htm
I am working on an art project involving collecting snail poo. They love to eat paper. I noticed this in the garden where I have left cardboard boxes out. The garden snails eat them and poo out different colours so I am collecting the paper colour poo. It’s taking a while …
Fantastic stuff!
This is the best thing I’ve seen on the web for ages.
Keep it up.
Peace.
Hi,
I was absolutely tickled to read about the project on BBC.
My 7 year old daughter just finished working on and presenting to a bemused group of moms and dads her passion project ………..SNAILs.
I can’t wait to show her your website when she comes home from school today.
Bloody Brilliant!!!
Question: Do the snails carry one single message at a time or do they carry all messages which have been queued since the previous “pick up”? If the former, your delivery method could catch on as a quirky little fad. If the latter, I’m afraid the queue would get so long that delivery times could average decades or even centuries.
Great!
Hopefully more happens for you all than a presentation at Bournemouth Uni. Although I guess that’s ok too …
greetings
Many felicitations on a brilliantly original idea .
I find that using snail mail has significantly changed the tone and content of my messages, since i dont know when the messages will arrive, i’m forced to think outside of this moment and take a broader view of my relationships with people.
Thank you so much for a wonderful oppurtunity to re-examine my life .
best of luck to your team and to Cecil , Austin and Muriel
What an ingenious way to make (at least some of) us stop and think about how absurd our lives are getting…
:)))
Finally, a slide or scoot toward snails rights. From escargot to S-Cargo Universal. If you could track snails movements in your backyard, do you think they would appreciate a lift from points A-Z?
I have just seen a link to this site on PCAdvisor http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/forums/index.cfm?action=showthread&threadid=328535&forumid=16
and have posted it on my blog http://blogs.24.com/ViewBlog.aspx?blogid=a0ce47a4-f803-4622-bba9-967cd9da2dd8
great stuff
Excellent work, keep it up! W00t!
How many times have I used the phrase ‘Snail Mail’ and failed to see the obvious application?!? Waste of talent, time and money? No – creative, amusing and definitely out-of-the-box!! (with more serious research undertones) Interesting idea about racing snails, above, too . . . Keep up the excellent right-angled thinking!
Seriously, I’d like to send congratulations to President-elect Obama on election night–November 4, 2008–by real snail mail but I’m worried I’m already too late. Do you think there is time yet to send congratulations for his inauguration on January 20, 2009?
P.S.
One small step for a snail. One giant leap for mollusks.
I would not like to be that snail carrying a chip on my back, because no other snail would love me anymore.
Bloody Marvelous!
Just sent a message by snail mail after reading the stroy on the BBC. Hoping my friend gets it by Sunday! Really neat idea i love not knowing when she’ll get my mail!
thanks for the smile.
I was explaining to my mother (who is 90 and a keen web user) how messages were passed around the internet. I have passed her a short cut to this project.
I hope the mail messages are backed up securely – using a shell script perhaps?
I have a garden full of snails. Where can I deliver them to you so they can do some useful work instead of eating my flowers and vegetables?
I have a couple of questions now,
1. will the people to whom i send snail-mail , know that the letter was sent via snail-mail , or should i mention it in my message ????
2.how long are you guys planning on running this service??
This is great! I read about it on BBC News as well. YAY for Google Reader! Where will you be presenting this here in LA? If this is part of a group of works I think it would be interesting to see what else is there.
It’d a joke you bonebrains!
It doesn’t actually exist!
Just fabulous! I have forwarded links to any friends who have serious sense of fun. It is this just sort of oblique humour that keeps some of us sane in the world today!
PS – loved some of the messages above – just great folks – nice to see there are people around as daft as me 🙂
PPS Are spiders the next project for this brilliant team? To provide the latest in world-wide webs? C
Fantastic!
I wonder if this could be developed further so that live snails, in the garden, could transmit a message to an electronic watering system to tell it when the garden needs watering? (Then fire salt pellets at the snails so they don’t eat the veg!)
Thanks for this, brightened up my lunch at work. Can’t wait to see the webcam up, we can ‘see’ email 🙂
This is a fantastic idea, as long as no snails were harmed- but they do look very happy.
Did you know that Helix aspersa is actually the fastest of the land snails, is this why it was chosen? To confirm this, I held snail races with several species of snail and slug, and Helix aspersa won every time.
I would like to try this with my giant African land snails, but I’m worried they might crush the electronics…
This is sweet!! All last night myself and my house mate were discusing the fastest possible internet connection we could get in our area. Only to find today that I am sending a message to him via possibly the slowest method on the net. I wonder when he will get it?
Superb concept which makes me laugh when I think about it!
If you need free music for your slow art project let me know.
Good luck in Los Angeles…..
Hi all, please find some key questions which we have responded to below…happy snailmailing!
Q: Have the snail mail snails actually sent any mail yet? I see Andrew is developing the readers still….
A:The readers are working in a development context however we are now working on making them stand alone. We can confirm that a number of emails have been forwarded at this time.
Q:Please check out our snails they race for charity worldwide and we would be happy to volunteer their services to your exciting new project.
A:Our snail are real yours appear to be virtual?
Q:Seriously, please do something useful with your lives. This is surely an inexcusable waste of talent, time and money.
A:The majority of the work has been done in our spare time and at very little cost. As you have noticed we are all very
talented and can afford, when not doing the very useful stuff we normally do, to splash it about abit on projects that make people smile.
Q: Do the snails carry one single message at a time or do they carry all messages which have been queued since the previous “pick up”? If the former, your delivery method could catch on as a quirky little fad. If the latter, I’m afraid the queue would get so long that delivery times could average decades or even centuries.
A:One at a time. we will be shortly including an estimated delivery time which as your rightly predict might extend into
millenia. The engineers we’ve been working with have come up with many ingenious ways of increasing the efficiency of the system. We have managed to diswade them from implementing any of them.
Q:Seriously, I’d like to send congratulations to President-elect Obama on election night–November 4, 2008–by real snail mail but I’m worried I’m already too late. Do you think there is time yet to send congratulations for his inauguration on January 20, 2009?
A:We hope to be able to give accurate estimations of delivery times in the near future.
Q:I would not like to be that snail carrying a chip on my back, because no other snail would love me anymore.
A:Not true we have clear evidence to suggest that the on shell chips have absolutely no effect in this area of snail
behaviour. The next generation of snailMailSnails might be captive bred.
Q:I have a garden full of snails. Where can I deliver them to you so they can do some useful work instead of eating my
flowers and vegetables?
A:We have a garden and no shortage of snails. Heliculture is on the up in the uk. have your thought of farming them for export?
Q: will the people to whom i send snail-mail , know that the letter was sent via snail-mail , or should i mention it in my message ????
A:yes a complete log of the emails journey along with details of the snail that carried it are appended to the email.
Q:how long are you guys planning on running this service??
A: as long as we can. We recognise that this is a very competitive market and feel we have carved out a new and as yet unexploited niche but I expect competitors may be developing rival services as we speak.
Q:Where will you be presenting this here in LA?
A:We are presenting this at SIGGRAPH2008 Los Angeles in the Slow Art Exhibition 12th – 14th August full details can be found at: http://www.siggraph.org/s2008/submissions/juried/slowart/
Q:It’d a joke you bonebrains! It doesn’t actually exist!
A:One of the problems with a project like this is making sure people don’t simply presume its a joke. Is there anythink we could have done to make it more compelling.You are welcome to come to our office and meet the snails in person. Contact us if you are interested.
Snailmailing is lots of fun!!!
Hi.
Your website is one of the best I’ve come across in a long time. I would like to award it the Coxsoft Art Silver Surfer Friendly Award. Please send me an e-mail and I’ll send you the award graphics to choose from, but not by snail mail unless you really want me to!
N.B. the award won’t cover this WordPress blog, only the website.
Very very interesting!!!
But using realsnailmail is it possible to send an email anywhere around the world – as a real web mail service – or only inside a smaller space (e.g. the same city, the same building and so on)?
Thank you very much
Following on from your significant development in snail mail technology we are delighted to announce that we have devised a breakthrough for filtering out SPAM messages. Our prototype RealSnailMail Spam filtering system has been tested with virtual snails and we feel it can easily be adapted to your real snails .. we now think that we have it cracked. See a demo of the new technology SPAM Filters working with one of our racing race night snails : http://www.fundeo.com/unexpected.aspx
Clearly, this technology has promise. The next evolution would be to have them carry TCP packets and submit it as an RFC. IPoSnail, anyone?
Absolutely amazing! I live in Brazil and the news reached me here this morning.
I’m sendind my yet to be born niece a message right now! This made my day! Congrats and keep going! 🙂
Love it. Are all Austin’s the same ? …”he’s always the one that gets to the food first”
Having been enrolled at Essex U. I met some brilliant UK evolutionists. But I wonder if evolutionists have considered that mollusks, who’ve been around a lot longer than us, might have tinkered with our DNA so that selected humans have chips on your shoulders? (Is that saying trans Atlantic or just in States?) Suggest to some folks here in the sweet home state “where the sky’s so blue” that snails might deliver emails faster than people and it wouldn’t be an evolution issue as much as a mega beer fest to see who could deliver email packets faster, smashed, sorry, drunk snails or smashed people.
Other bloggers have expressed concern about snails as garden pests. Surely we can develop a pre-K curriculum for toddler snails that rewards them for eating weeds not veggies in exchange for us not eating our chewy little garlic buttered soul mates. I seek experienced grant writers to prepare a research grant app to support the above research. The above will be an interactive web cast art project. Would anyone like to participate in this project? Preference will be given to those with original and creative moves.
This is a wonderful idea. Congratulations in spotting the gap in the market! Thought-provoking and beautiful.
It would be great to have the web cam up and running: what a great way that would be to slow down!!!
Hope you don’t get overwhelmed with messages now that the BBC and other media have spread your details far and wide. I really want my message to be delivered, just not for a while yet!
Q: But using realsnailmail is it possible to send an email anywhere around the world – as a real web mail service.
A: Yes.
Great concept and congratulations on the implementation – the mind swims with possibilities – bees, for example, if you could miniaturise the RFID components enough .. and then perhaps have the messages split in to chunks to spread the load amongst a number of bees, so it each message becomes a communal effort, not an individual one .. the spirit of the beehive indeed.
Fabulous idea, tip top! I’ve just read about your project on the BBC website. Now…. dare I resign my job via your snail mail…. ?
well done & go Muriel, you’ve hidden depths (if not speed) I’m sure.
This is so interesting! It brightened my day! It’s ok if it has no immediate implications. The idea is innovative enough to be pursued.
hi,
i read about your project in spiegel online. it’s one of the best internet-ideas i know. congratulation!!!!
best regards
peter
A real brilliant concept. Since my last name is
beetle I wonder if beetles also could be RFID carriers, too.
I wish all the best to the snails to live long and prosper.
I think this is great – for the first time we are being encouraged to slow down – i yearn for the days when we could say the reply was in the post and get a few more days to actually write and send it. that was lost when email came along. we can start that again now. which of my work colleagues do i try it on first …
am having a tough day today – this has made me smile! pace of life is too fast sometimes… nothing wrong with slowing down for a bit!
Great idea! They seems to be faster, than our company’s exchange server 🙂
/regards
cheffe
What a fantastic idea 🙂
Go on Austin!
HI
What a great way to send messages. It is also about the same speed as the regular mail here in Amsterdam.
Anyway keep up the good work
“Everybody”
“we are snailing, we are snailing across the tank……..la la la la”
Jez X
Congrats on a wonderful project 😀
Could you add an option to includes attachments with mail or do you think this may impede the snail team’s progress?
Fantastic job, puts those fancy terabit switches to shame – keep up the good work !
Andre
Идея очень интересная! 🙂
Hi all!
I’d just like to say what a brilliant idea, all the very best at the exhibition! Its going to be cool seeing just how long it’s going to take to receive the emails! Think we could all do with slowing down a bit and having more fun in this hectic life.
Best wishes!
Awesome!
Fantastic project… Great Website… and so much fun!
Well done to all the team… keep it up!
Maybe you could add a ‘paypal donation link’ to your site – then people could sponsor the snails (maybe the one that delivered their email) ?
Anybody remember the RFC for IPCP (Internet Protocol over Carrier Pigeon)? IPCP and MMS (Mollusk Mail Service) probably couldn’t be deployed in the same area due to one ‘eating’ the packets of the other 🙂
Is there an postal insurance required if using RealSnailMail in France? There’s a chance your mail steed may be scoffed down with a gob of garlic butter brushed over its fetlocks? On the upside, the distance your mail travels may be significantly increased, albeit temporarily?
Thanks for doing this. I think gastropods are awesome, and your project is wonderful. I’m sending email to a friend who wrote a thesis on prehistoric gastropodae.
What a brilliant idea. I’ve often wanted to send delayed mail. I even tried typing re a l l y s l o w l y, but nothing seemed to work.
Why didn’t I think of it ?!!! Congratulations. I hope your royalty payments arrive by the same method.
I have tried to send a realsnailmail email to my son but when I click your send button I get a Windows Internet Explorer message
“The following error/s occurred
Please check in the terms of referencecheck box”
Perhaps Microsoft are jealous of your brilliant service.
I have read and reread the terms of service and see no problem
is there any way I can tell what stage a message I have sent is at, or where it is in the queue ?
Re E-mail toting Escargot, don’t eat the messenger!
Brilliant idea. Our crazy world can be changed.
Keep at it !!!
I love this website.
Just enough lunacy and just enough practicality. I can’t wait to send something snail mail.
No literally…
P.S. I have a suggestion for you for the profile page… bios!
I don’t know about the rest of the people, but I think I’d feel better if I knew my message was months late because “Sean” has a propensity for eating late and doesn’t like to exercise…. just an idea!
It is really great!
I’ve read about it in Russian magazine Chemistry and Life.
And I’ve tried it as soon as possible!
Waiting for a mails! ))
P.S. It is very interesting, where is my mail now?
If It is carrying? And Who is carry it?
I read about this in Time Magazine and thought wow, what a refreshing idea! It’s so cool had to try it out right away. However, do you get a e-mail sent to you when yours is delivered?
interested in your project= if you want to document your project in Leonardo Journal contact me=
Imagine my shock when finding this website and seeing that I am not the only one who paints numbers on snails! Our’s are not encumbered by RFID’s and we use red nail-polish rather than white paint. But we have been catching and tagging and releasing snails in our backyard for a while as we watch their movements around their natural habitat.
The RFID thing is cute to make the snailmail analogy… but I’m much more of a Free-Range snail guy.
Keep up the good work.
this is soooooooo cool