For those of you living in Dubai this law must be a constant niggle if you rent property or indeed use cheques in any way.

It is a serious criminal offence to write a cheque that bounces. It routinely ends up with a prison sentence for the cheque writer.

A senior Dubai judge has commented that this law can be harsh if a blank cheque was issued as is required when renting property, for example, and there was no intent to write a fraudulent cheque.

See this Kipp Report article for more details.

kippreport.com/

Now, I don’t know about you but I use Email a lot. It is an imperfect system and it can be difficult to know if the intended recipient has actually received it.

One ‘too’l that helps me is requesting Read Receipts. This is not foolproof, but if someone does give Read Receipts when they open an Email it does help the sender to know it actually got there.

When I was a barrister ‘in chambers’ our clerks started to use email extensively. They did give Read Receipts for a while. However, following a few things not being done by the said clerks in a timely fashion and having the time of the Read Receipt used as an indication of when the intruction Email was recived, they stopped doing it.

Since then I have always thought that any business that does not give Read Receipts has something to hide. Am I wrong about this? Is there a good reason not to do this? with good open communications in mind I managed to persuade Les Kinch of Parrot Hosting to do this as I am using him to do my new websites.