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U.S. Post Office and E-mail
PenguinRadio writes "The Post Office, masters of innovation and cutting edge technology, are now moving into cyberspace in a big way. The Washington Post is reporting a new effort to move the snail mail carriers into the electronic age, with a number of new proposals including assigning an e-mail address to every physical address in the United States." I'm reminded of that episode of Seinfeld where Kramer discovers that the Post Office is obsolete.
1. E-Mail can't replace the shipment of physical parcels.
Email doesn't deliver my computer to my doorstep. It doesn't ship boxes of tools around the countryside. It can't get your locally-bought Christmas present to your loved ones (don't talk to me about on-line shipping - guess what happened this year when people tried to make e-returns. Didn't work too hot, eh?) Until we find a way to create matter out of energy (Star Trek, anyone?) it just isn't going to happen any time soon. (Even the energy-to-matter scenerio wouldn't work too hot...you would need a full-time nuclear reactor at each residence to send something the size of a deck of cards.)
2. Email is (incredibly) insecure
Email is incredibly insecure, the equivelent of an old-fashioned postcard. It's so insecure that I don't trust it for much more than a "Hi there, how are you" type message. Nosy system admins, hacker wanna-bes, private investigators, and my neighbor's overgrown chia-pet can all easily read my email, provided that I don't take the precation of encrypting it. Sure, I can understand encryption, but do you think Joe Average will? Do you trust Joe Average to use it correctly (ie. not do something stupid like send passwords, social security numbers, etc. over unsecured channels?) When I send a letter, it's normally covered with an envelope. If I'm concerned about privacy, it will be a privacy envelope (the inside is covered with a quasi-random dark pattern that prevents see-through attempts - and yes, I know about the "letter visualizers" that make paper transparent). Physical concerns? Well, let's just say that the only way to read the letter is to open the envelope - a sure sign that someone has compromized the letter along the delivery route. (What's that? You mean you thought envelopes where merely for holding all the contents? Acutally, envelopes were an assurance of privacy from centries ago, in a time when sending controvercial material could get you hanged or worse. The envelope was the assurance that the materials presented to the recipient were from the original sender, UNTAMPERED. The closest we could come to in a digital world would be something like quantum crypto packets)
3. The USPS has it's hands tied.
The USPS is a government agency. It means that it must answer not to just the public but to all the people in power who think they "know better" but really don't. The next time you grumble about the postal service being a quasi-competitive industry, you should thank Mr. Regan (48th US President) for the current state of affairs (and the people that put him in office, namely the "baby boom" generation - you know who I'm talking about, it's our parents). (we'll politely avoid all of the other brain-damaged things he did while in office - never mind the suspicion that he had alzheimers while IN office...)
and lastly...
4. Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
What saddens me the most is that the younger generation of people in the USA seem to think, "well, we embrace a new way of life and living, therefore we should not only discard the old way of doing things, but completely forget why we did them that way to begin with". There are REASONS for why things are the way they are, and assuming that the old way is "the stupid way" really shows just how ignorant, gullible, and thoughtless American youth have become. In fact, I'll probably have several attacks on this point of interest - it'll be a shame, because each attack will simply validate my point (ie. I'm trying to say that understanding the history of something will allow you to understand why things happen today, and give you a better perspective of what will happen tommarrow).
Forgive the spelling and gramatical errors, frankly, I don't have time to correct them this morning. The essence of this diatribe was to get a clear message across to those who are "historically challenged" (er, that's PC-speak for ignorant and under-educated).
Thoughtful opinions graciously accepted, especially well-thought-out counterpoints that attempt to refute these statements. Flames, especially thoughtless ones, are given a tidy arrangement in /dev/null.
Oh, I don't believe in login accounts for things like this. Personally, I feel Slashdot needs cookies vs. the clumsy login system.
Signed,
- Avery Payne.
jd asked "Last, but not least, what problem is this supposed to be solving? If it's the transfer of information, then they'd be better off buying ultra-fat pipes and selling space on them."
Good question.
If it is the transfer of information (and that seems the only reasonable) answer, then by all means, let the post office kindly slither back into its corner and let my ISP, my phone company, my cable company, my electric company, my cellular provider, Hughes satellite, and anyone else who cares to join the fray hash it out. (Will the local water / sewage utilities offer IP packet delivery over a very fat pipe?)
The post office has enough trouble with delivering postcards from my brother. Why should we subsidize the same US post office which undercuts competitors with the surplus it earns on first-class mail? (Remember, they're the only ones who can deliver it -- by law. That's a real monopoly.)
The business of "establishing" post offices (the part the constition Mentions) I'm fine with the PO doing -- but until and unless the actual work of mail delivery is privatized, they have no business getting to the broadband market. (As in, no Constitutionally established right.)
Just thoughts,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Hey, they may be obsolete, but I really like their www.stampsonline.com site for buying stamps online. I can pick the ones I want (unlike the local office) and shipping and handling is only $1! Try it once, it's cooler that you'd expect at first.
--LP
Now, let's see how many ways this is a bad idea...
You forgot that the addresses will certainly be derived by some obvious algorithm (e.g., 123_main_st@9-digit-zip-code.usps.gov) or they will simply be a sequence of nonsense addresses that fit an obvious pattern (e.g., e-mail-box-74351a@usps.gov). Either way, building spam lists with hundreds of millions of addresses will be trivial. Those e-mail addresses will all be in a single domain. I can just imagine the volume of spam that will start hitting them days after this scheme starts.
Oh, and the mailbox will effectively carry the name Resident and will be passed on to the next occupant of the house. That raises the possibility of people subscribing other people to all sorts of exciting mailing lists.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
I have to argue that the post office is really going anywhere soon. While they might not be sending "Hey, How you doing?" letters as much as they used to, they (along with UPS, etc.) as benefiting from the internet boom along with the rest of us. Someone's got to get all those books from Amazon out to us, and somebody's got to deliver me the money orders from Ebay bids.
This sentence hurt my brain so early in the morning. Email transcends one's physical location (especially with POP3 accounts) and allows me to move around the country without changing anything. Making my email address based on my physical address would be analogous to attaching a RJ11 to a cell phone.
In the past year and a half I have moved 4 times, twice across the country. (Please send condolences to my poor wife). My US Mail is hopelessly confused and mis-redirected. Moreover at each new residence I received 3 generations of previous occupants' mail. Ugh! Imagine receiving the email meant for previous occupants from people or companies about whom those now-departed (but not dearly...) didn't care enough to update their whereabouts...
Worse, it seems to me the only advantage in a physically-tied email address is demographic clustering for targeted advertising, or, can you say "SPAM ME ALL DAY LONG"?
How many of you would give up the personalization (and anonymity) of a true "e"-mail address for a re-packaged target-market adverstising box (UPSP Mail Box)?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
The idea of creating email addresses for every physical address in the U.S. is just the latest "reengineering" mistake of applying automation to an outdated process.
It's quite simple... people get mail, not houses. Nobody sends mail to a physical address -- they send it to a person or company. The physical address is just the only way the post office had to identify a particular location where that person or company was to receive its mail.
In this age, that addressing scheme is taken care of and the physical element is worthless.
If they're going to assign addresses, they should do it for every PERSON and COMPANY in the U.S., not every physical address. Of course, I don't know of an addressing scheme that would make this easy (sounds like we need PIDs of some sort -- like social security numbers but not usable to trace health records and the like).
The Post Office was actually originally offered the first crack at Internet mail way back when the Internet was first being developed. They passed on it saying it didn't interest them. So this is hardly a new idea.
Dantelope
(who STILL cannot figure out how to get through the DaimlerChrysler firewall to find his password that goes to an email address he no longer has access to -- *sigh* -- weren't computers supposed to make my life EASIER???)
"and if there is no internet access to a mailbox, they'll print it out and hand deliver it to the address"
Now, let's see how many ways this is a bad idea...
1) Spam will kill trees and fill physical mailboxes. I hope "postage" is charged back to the sender and not delivered "postage due"
2) The benefit of paperless communication with someone is short circuited
Then, there are some letters which would become very complicated (if they aren't, already). Legal documents, for example, go through an obscenely complex process, to ensure that everything is as it should be. If some nutcase in the post office can tamper with it, electronically, that would make things very awkward. (And, yes, I know it's possible to prevent things like that, eg: PGP. But how many lawyers would -you- trust to use anything more complex than a quill pen correctly?)
Then, there's the fact that they'd be printing the e-mails out. Ummm - that means they'd also get to read them. The reason I use an envelope is to stop that. This seems a very retrograde step.
Next, there's the problem of assigning that many unique e-mail addresses. Your average PHB likes to use the firstname.lastname@somewhere format. This won't work, when you've thirty John Doe's on the same street.
Last, but not least, what problem is this supposed to be solving? If it's the transfer of information, then they'd be better off buying ultra-fat pipes and selling space on them. They could probably manage that, without making a mess of it, and it might give the backbone a decent capacity for a change.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Are you kidding me?
Here we have a government organization that recognizes its present limitations and is working hard at finding new and unique ways to serve the taxpayers of this country and we complain?
Have we become that cynical?
When was the last time you heard about any government agency calling large scale attention to the fact that it needs to update itself for the times and serve its paying public better than ever, with new functionality and features?
C'mon. This is something to be proud of--an agency that doesn't deny its faults.
And, incidentally, we kinda *do* need their help.
Lets not forget for a moment that while email *is* the killer app, it's also the most insecure system in wide deployment by an immense degree. I can't easily forge your identity on websites using cookies, and your credit card transactions are reasonably secure, but all I need to know is your email address and I'm sending mails as you.
There are lots of competing standards for digital signatures--which, incidentally, will become a globally accepted technology long before encrypted email content worms its way into public acceptance--but whatever wins, I guarantee you we can expect the USPS to be involved.
And I'm happy to have them. Folks, I actually think it's kind of an interesting concept to have Email to Physical Address gateways--given the cost of a postcard, I honestly wouldn't be surprised to see advertising agencies start trading the right to gateway for the right to display advertisements to both the sender and the receiver. But I see something beyond that...digital signatures, authenticated by government agencies and valid in court, set into paper by the nearest available USPS printing center, and couriered ASAP to a final destination. Sounds cool to me.
It's not my job to think up new and cool uses for postal service technology, but I'm proud to see that someone, somewhere within the USPS, has taken up that role.
More power to him!
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
1) Get Congress to modify the laws so that the other express carriers can deliver to P.O. Boxes.
2) Develop a next generation Post Office that would make practical the delivery of every thing one can buy via e-commerce, particularly perishable goods. These Post Offices will need to be open and staffed 24 x 7. You would get your packages stored there for a modest monthly fee based on your historical package volume and/or type.
3) Begin closing the legacy Post Offices around the country and opening these Post Offices in strip shopping malls with lots of parking.
I believe this will work as a strategy because a lot more people who do not have computers today can be convinced to get computers or internet appliances if they think e-commerce is useful. The problem is that large scale business-to-consumer e-commerce cannot be made practical until delivery of perishable and large items can be made secure and relatively inexpensive for the shipper.
If people really bought into this, the Post Office could end up being a strip shopping center anchor tenant in many towns. By this I mean, the size of a supermarket. I'm not sure how this would work in cities, although I'm pretty sure that this would not be an issue in places like Manhattan, due to the fact that door-to-door delivery with extended hours.
--
Dave Aiello
-- Dave Aiello
Perhaps you missed the point--
For 33 cents, you can put a letter in a box out in front of your house. A person will drive to your house, pick up the letter, take it to the airport, fly it to anywhere in north america, and drive it to the recipients house. For 33 cents.
Fedex and UPS will charge you at least 30 times that amount (about $10 for a letter), and they won't pick it up unless you are a business. If there's no UPS or Fedex near you, you're SOL.
Of all the monopolies in the world to complain about the USPS is about the last that deserves it. For as insanely inexpensive as the service is, the fact that 99.99999% of mail gets to its destination on time, and that it is available even in the most remote parts of the country, is an amazing accomplishment.
As the first poster pointed out, it's one of the only government agencies (and indeed one of the first companies ON EARTH) to completely embrace technology and automation to save time, money, and reduce costs. The USPS has been using automated systems to sort mail since before Bill gates was arrested and Fedex was a gleam in a venture capitalist's eye.
Save your attitude for the phone companies...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
My dad is retired from the Technical Training Center here in Norman, OK and they had some neat stuff. Post Office (along with Pitney Bowes (sp?)) did some pioneering research on Optical Character Recognition for auto-sorting letters. This HUGE fricking computer/letter sorter thing that took up this giant room. These letters flying (lots a second, I don't recall the number) through a scanner reading the addresses and sorting them.
People bad mouth the postal service all the time. My success rate at sending packages through the mail is still way higher than my sending attached files in an email to any non-geek. I still say, for them to deliver a physical piece of paper in a few days to any house, anywhere in the country is damn impressive.
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