Slashdot Mirror
How The Postman Almost Owned E-Mail
Thrawn writes "'Imagine that the U.S. Postal Service was in charge of e-mail. Sound absurd? It does to most people until they realize that it almost happened.' " I think the chance of it actually happening are massively overstated in this article, but it's still an interesting "What If". But about as likely, as say, The Confederacy ? winning the US Civil War ? .
What is he suggesting? That any other systems of E-mail aside from ones controlled by the USPS would be *illegal*?
Yep. It's already illegal to compete with the U.S. Postal Service for non-expedited personal mail.
I'm not sure if the USPS does anything like this, but Canada Post runs epost.ca, which is like their version of Hotmail. It's free, and the upshot is that you can configure your account so that the various companies that you interact with, such as the phone company, the cable company, your bank, etc, send emails via epost.ca rather than printed bills or notices.
I guess it works because in some sense email from epost.ca is "official", since it's run by the Post Office. Sort of a neat concept, I guess.
Yeah. Back in November, 2000, the democrats used the lack of the postmark to disenfranchise thousands of military personnel. Oh, but surely those votes were evenly split between Gore and Bush, they were just making sure the letter of the law outweighed the spirit of the law this time.
Here is one argument that addresses the costs of sustaining the post office monopoly. Also see this one.
The whole damned thing could have been won after 1st manassis. nothern generals before Grant became eastern theatre commander were fairly lame. However, the south didn't make the move. If they had followed the nothern army on the retreat, they would have been able to take DC on the first day of the war. That would more than likely be called 'winning' -- capturing the enemy capitol in record time. yup.
The USPS has been at the leading edge of technology in many cases. As another poster mentioned, do a Google for Linux USPS and see what you find. I speak from first-hand experience: I have worked on USPS' Linux systems. They have over 5000 dual-CPU boxes running Linux, sorting mail at real-time speeds (which is 13 pieces per second, mind you). The USPS handles 40% of the world's postal mail. They process over 500 million pieces of mail each and every working day.
The USPS also has a huge network of SGI boxen deployed, again reading and sorting addresses (but this time those that were missed by the Linux boxes).
With the current mess at ICANN, NSI, etc. do you think the USPS could have done any worse?
And BTW: before you take potshots at the $0.37 FC postage rates, check the rates at other countries in Europe, f'rinstance.
I have personally seen farmers deliver chicken hatchlings, ducks, etc. to the USPS for delivery, I kid you not. Live cargo! Lets see FedEx/UPS do anything even close.
"The act required the Postal Service to âoepromote modern and efficient operations and [avoid] any practiceâ¦which restricts the user of new equipment or devices which may reduce the cost or improve the quality of postal services...â"
What I love about this is that I know someone who works for the USPS and came up with US Patent 5,339,734. It is a small hand bar code stamper. Simple idea that would save tens of MILLIONS of dollars, if the USPS would promote the use of it.
The address (ZIP code) on the front of an envelope is read by some OCR machines. If the OCR thinks it has a pretty good match (which it usually does) then it sends the letter on its way. This is very little problem for the majority of machine printed addresses and ZIP codes. Hand written addresses however cause more problems for OCR, which is why there is a secondary step of humans sitting in front of computer screens checking the addresses of the mail that the OCR machines did not like. The people watching the screens are doing the high speed assembly line equivalent of hand sorting mail.
None of this comes into play, however, if the ZIP (or ZIP+4) is BAR CODED onto the envelope. Check out some bulk mail for the bar code on the envelope. That step eliminates the OCR and human mail sorter from the equation. Since the machines look for the bar code anyway, less steps = less money.
The hand held bar coder would cost less than a few stamps if produced in bulk, but the USPS is unwilling to even consider the idea, because it would put hundreds of USPS employees out of work.
Ummm, Jon, aren't you supposed to be dead...? - Otter(3800)
The article makes it sound as if the USPS wanted a "private express" type monopoly in email. I have a long memory of these things, and very seriously doubt it! Remember, email as we know it began over the ARPAnet in 1972; single-computer email goes back farther. Lots of people (myself included) were on the ARPAnet in the late '70s, using email galore. There was no thought of shutting us down. In the 1980s, there was also a lot of uucp mail, fido, DECnet, BITnet, and other types of email besides the venerable SMTP. These just could not be banned or shut down.
And don't forget X.400, the 1980s idiot bastard child of the ITU itself, an email protocol so baroque that only a Lotus Notes developer could love it. X.400 was a bad implementation of a good idea, that being to have a multivendor standard. They just ignored SMTP's existence, even as millions used it. Right into the early 1990s there were people arguing that X.400's supposedly greater capabilities were necessary.
Various worldwide postal agencies did build something called IntElPost (sp?) in the late '70s and early '80s; basically, it was international Group IV fax service between post offices. The USPS was not allowed to participate; it still operates in some countries.
Somebody else has noted how the USPS introduced a truly awful RJE-printer papermail service, ECOM, which flopped big time. I note that MCI Mail, a 1981-ish consumer/business email service, had a paper-output option too; I occasionally used it to send paper mail.
The USPS could potentially play a role in a future e-post system; that might be one way to cut spam. I'd be happy to pay, oh, a penny or so per email, provided that spammers did too. More likely, it would have to be some kind of micropayment scheme wherein my inbox would block something without an e-stamp, which would cost too much for a spammer. Of course that doesn't need the USPS, but they could be a player if they got their act together.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
In the late '80s there were several meetings/discussions between the various email providers and the USPS regarding X.500 Directory Services (including X.509 digital certificates) where the USPS tried to take ownership of the U.S. domain for all electronic directory entries. The ones I sat in on were pretty sad. The postal service folks were clueless about that they were going after or how they would actually offer and manage the systems so it died by common consent in a NIST/CCITT sub-committee. It was scary the first time we discussed the long term concequences though.