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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 ? .
From this information, the post office never even came close to "owning" email. They considered offering it as a service.
A much better analogy is:
"What if the Postman owned the first hotmail"
Tons of variations which are closer to reality exist, but hotmail sums it all up in a sentence everyone would understand.
The word "owned" is very misleading, and not supported in the article. They almost owned email as much as they own package delivery today. (Think UPS and FedEx)
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
It also seems that the USPS wasn't trying to control eMail, but add a service to their physical handling of mail to speed up delivery.
Naturally, free and independent email services would operate alongside it, but imagine if, for a reasonable fee, you could have a postal service mail account in which all e-mails it sends or recieves have all the same protections and legal bearing of snail mail. I think this service would be invaluable for businesses or independent professionals. Many things can not be done over e-mail because the messages do not bear the same legal weight as snail mail. Consider how many times the postal service's datestamp has been used as evidence in court.
Given the volatility of the ISP market, a national email infrastructure would have been a wonderful thing. You could maintain a permanent email with the US Post Office and not have to worry about what might happen to your address if your service provider should change.
Imagine not having to worry about @mediaone.com suddenly not working for you. Just about every major provider has undergone a substantial shift in how they process emails, resulting in everything from new domain names to new mail accounts. I can't tell you how many people I can no longer find @compuserve.com.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
The USPS delivers junk mail to my house every day because corporations pay the USPS to deliver it. My mail carrier hides my real mail in the newspaper-like junk mail so I have to flip through it to avoid throwing out real mail. He does this because the postal service makes a large chunk of its revenue this way, yet it still loses money regularly.
Spam would be easier to filter out
The fact that it would no longer be free would cut down on the volume of spam and the variation, making it much easier to detect and filter out.
Email would be more closely monitored
for subversive/threatening content, copyrighted content, etc. And unlike traditional mail, anonymity would be impossible because the mail would be sent from an account connected directly to your name, home address and social security number.
It would cost us money per email
Right now we can send all the emails we want (more or less) without fear of a huge bill. But if the USPS controlled email, you'd probably have the option of buying "stamps" on a per-email basis or having your account billed monthly. You would pay perhaps 3 cents for up to 100k, 5 cents for 200k and so on.
1) Large behemouth companies controlling the MTAs,
restricting home users from running their own.
2) Large companies pushing proprietary protocols for
communications, and pushing these protocols into
e-mail messages, and suing anyone who attempts to
reverse engineer them.
3) Large companies adding macro execution code to
e-mail readers, so that a virus suddenly becomes
world-wide in a matter of an hour.
I say, let the government have e-mail service. Let
them compete with companies. I'd like to see a
U.S. Postal add claiming "Virus Free Plain Text
Messaging from the USPS. $5.00/month, 25MB accounts.
Log on today."
Further, I'd like US Postal inspectors to have some
authority over scams and unsolicited e-mails. It's
gotten so that 30% of my monthy bill (judged by
bandwith usage on the backbones, roughly) goes to fund
the 300 or so companies that run mass e-mail
advertising. I'd LOVE for the USPS to have regulatory
authority over commercial unsolicited advts, just like
they have over printed materials.
I don't like to accuse people of out hand, but the Confederacy winning the Civil War was a fairly likely thing for the first few years. Most Union generals (McClellan, Banks, Burnside) measured up very poorly against their Confederate counterparts (Lee, Jackson, Johnston).
Had the south won the Battle of Antietam in 1862, as it almost did, the war would have likely ended. Even as late as 1864 Lincoln was in serious electoral trouble until Grant finally delivered. Had McClellan won, he would have pursued peace.
I can excuse spelling mistakes, but as a historian I am appalled at the ignorance of the editors.
~Chazzf
No statement is true, not even this one.
Look at per capita income, education level, literacy rates, etc. The deep south is a 2nd world country.
What would it mean if the south had won? It means they would have been allowed to split off into their own country. They weren't the aggressors in the civil war you know...
At the time, the north was industrialized, the south was an agricultural society. I'm betting you don't relize it was economic factors (ie -tarriffs on imports to protect northern industries, resulting in foreign countries having tarriffs on our export - Southern cotton) that led to the civil war.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I heard a proposal about this about a year ago on NPR. Make some (U.S.) governmental agency, presumably the post office, responsible for creating an e-mail for everyone or at least available for everyone. As proposed, it would be a FREE (beer) and free (from spam) service. Tax payer dollars would be paying for it in the end. But I thought it was a very interesting idea, this way important notices from the government directed to you would could sent via snail mail and/or through e-mail. It would be a way for the government (good or bad) to get in touch with you if you had moved often or just prefer doing things online. License renewal coming up? They would send you a reminder. Male and 18, they would let you know that you have to register for selective service. Links to the IRS 'round tax time. Speeding ticket? It would "remind" you of the location of where to send the check, or the address of the courthouse. When you should be getting your tax refund. List of candidates for local, state and national offices during election. I'm sure that it will certainly speed up the government end of communication, instead of having to rely on snail mail. It would certainly make the government more friendly (and perhaps more intrusive). I think the key part to this though is that this mail must be able to be forwarded to another e-mail account. People wouldn't check their government account about back taxes they owe or about local elections. Most people don't care and aren't interested but if sent to an already existing account it would be useful. I think the big question however is that would only the government have use of this e-mail account? I'm not sure how spam could be prevented otherwise. I have given none of my friends my hotmail e-mail address and yet I am spammed all day. In the end I don't think that it would "work" but an interesting thought.
We had to destroy the sig to save the sig.
First, you submitted mail by emulating an IBM remote-job entry system and submitting a batch job. Error messages came back the next day, by paper mail. Really.
You had to send a minimum number of mail pieces per batch, the minimum being 100 or so. And they all had to have the same first 2 digits of the zip code, because the whole batch was printed at the same place, in some regional mail-handling facility. The switching was per-job, not per-message. (Some third party company tried to set up a switching system to take individual messages and accumulate them, but it didn't catch on.)
Finally, it cost about the same as first class mail. More for long messages, based on pages printed.
Even bulk mailers didn't like it. The biggest objection was that you couldn't include a return envelope, so it was useless for bills.
Not that private enterprise did much better. FedEx tried something called ZapMail, where you faxed your message to a receiver in a FedEx truck, which then drove to the destination and delivered the message. Two-hour delivery. Killed by cheap fax machines.
Federalizing the internet (espcially if there
.. but there are plenty of ISPs out
..
was a monopoly government ISP) would be the
first step towards eliminating your rights
online.
Sure, commercial ISPs can disconnect you for
whatever reason they want, or block certain
traffic
there, so if you don't like one then you can
always switch.
If the government owned the internet, systems
like carnivore or regulations like the CDA
could be put in place without any need to
pass laws to force commercial ISPs to
participate. Private ISPs on the other hand
hate implementing those kind of things,
because it costs them time and money
I was completely bowled over by email and used it a lot. To my dismay, however, in something like 1979 or so they renamed the program, which had been called "mail," because of concerns that the US Postal Service owned the name. The program was renamed "note" and most of us geeks thought the decision was hilariously stupid.
It's fascinating to read this article and realize that what must have been going on was an effort by the USPS to protect its "brand name" for mail. I can just imagine IBM getting a lawyer letter from the Postal Service threatening legal action if they didn't stop using the word mail.
I disagree. Royal Mail (the UK postal service) is very good. Twice daily deliveries in most places, six days a week. I put a letter in the mail, it shows up the next day, and I've never seen anything get lost. Of course it's a much smaller country, so it's easier to be good and fast. :)
Still, though the UK does have a long tradition of an excellent postal service.
I'm really disappointed that nobody has yet pointed out that the Internet, SMTP, and all that were built on projects funded by the US Government. The DOD's ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), to be precise. I was using it back in the 70's, and I was quite aware of where the funding came from.
And the actual constructions was done almost entirely by universities. The few "private" companies involved (such as BB&N) were living almost entirely off government grants and contracts.
The corporate enterprise ideologists are trying hard to invent their own history so that they can claim some of the credit. But this is all historic revisionism. The real credit belongs to the evil old government, in collusion with a lot of academic hackers.
It may be true that forms of email were developed by a number of computer vendors. But they were all proprietary (even UUCP and DECnet), didn't interoperate worth a damn, and mostly couldn't be licensed for a finite cost.
It's kinda too bad. I've always thought that UUCP mail was better than SMTP. But if was freed by AT&T a bit too late, and SMTP already had the territory. Note that SMTP is defined by a set of US government standards.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
My dad was active in politics in his younger days, and someone at the USPS opened read every letter that came from party headquarters. The local postmaster could not have cared less, being from the other party....
Would you like spam with that?
Government is business, backwards: they aren't customers, they're cases. They aren't opportunities, they're burdens. To properly fight spam, we'll have to raise your taxes....
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
The difference is that the plan was created in 1982, when the only people that had even *heard* about email were geeks working for the government, large universities, or large corps.
It also provides the opportunity to have legally binding email. Todays email can be forged on either end without digital signatures (I won't get in to crypto here), but the penalties for doing so are relatively meek if they are even enforced. Whereas, messing with the USPS is mail fraud, which is what they sent Al Capone to jail for.
Ummm, Jon, aren't you supposed to be dead...? - Otter(3800)
Now I know that the South has it's fair share of backwater far right conservatives, but don't lump all of the South in with them
Al Gore's from Tennessee.
Bill Clinton's from Arkansas.
Billy Carter's from Georgia.
Doug Wilder, former gov of Virginia, was the first elected Black governor in the US.
Sure, we also gave the nation Ollie North, Jesse Helms, and Jerry Falwell.
So think of the South more as a region of extremes instead of Bible toting gun weilding conservatives.
*Texas is Texas. It does not count as a Southern state any more than Oklahoma does.
We'd have to, of course, relocate some people. For instance, how could we allow bush to stay in washington? That's in the liberal-but-not-greenpeace section of the nation!
I'll stand corrected. I had that word of mouth.
As far as the other points you make, please substantiate them. Or did postal hisotry revisionists destroy that in a Vanal-esque period of American history we are unaware of?
Other posters have pointed out the the feud between the USPS and western union. (Composing a web search for the similar issue with fax is difficult, since there's so much stuff mentioning faxing and mailing filings for suits. B-) And I don't have time to hit a hardcopy library. So if you want to assert that the fight over the telegraph established precedents on wire transmission that headed off a fight on faximile I won't argue.)
On my main point: If you don't want to hit a physical library do a search for "Lysander Spooner" just for starters. here's a sample (edited to somewhat less colorfull language. When history - especially anarchist history - gets onto the web it's often posted by people with axes to grind. B-) ):
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way