Canadian mail situation and Epost

Not sure this is the right forum for this, so as usual feel free to move if appropriate.

Like many other Canadians, I switched to "paperless" transactions as a result, as much as possible. Incoming benefit payments have been changed to direct deposit, I'm setting up rent to be paid on a preauthorized-debit basis rather than by check, and all monthly bills are now online-only. I've paid monthly bills (except rent) via my bank's online service for years anyway.

One of my creditors, it turns out, uses Canada Post's epost for its online billings, rather than their own site. (They're going through a change of ownership, so that will hopefully change.) Got my first email notification a day or two ago, logged into epost to see the bill, and was horrified to find they'll accept nothing except Adobe's browser plug-in for viewing PDF, despite Adobe's notorious security problems.

I emailed the epost webmaster reminding him of this, and insisted that the PDFs be made downloadable so they can be read with the subscriber's choice of viewer (I use Tracker's PDF-Xchange). Failing that, I'd have no choice but to advise the creditor that epost was not a viable option, and that I'd close my account if they couldn't come up with a suitable alternative.

 

Nothing but Adobe Acrobat Reader, ah? Interesting...

 

I got a reply from epost later on saying essentially t.s., they had no intention of changing their requirements. So I phoned the creditor's (major department store chain, HBC) customer service, explained the situation and suggested the possibility that I might have to pay off my account in full and close it if they couldn't fix things. He was nice enough to give me the unpublicized addy of a place on their own site where I can get the same info, and said he'd pass the complaint about epost to his superiors. So at least I did get somewhere, and maybe they too will decide that epost could cost them customers.