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 I'm reminded of that episode of Seinfeld where Kramer discovers that the Post Office is obsolete.

Comments

Some thoughts...

[jd]

There's something about a hand-written letter that just can't be duplicated, electronically. And, no, it's not the ability to scrunch it up and throw it in the fireplace.

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.

Why Complain About The Post Office?

[Effugas]

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

Post Office Should Open 24hr Ecomm Package Centers

[dave_aiello]

If the Post Office really wants to survive in the 21st Century, they need to do the following:

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

Re:Post office is actually pretty tech

[NMerriam]

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...

Post office is actually pretty tech

[Pfhreakaz0id]

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.