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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 ? .
Great, just what I wanted, a disgrunteled postal worker handling all my E-Mail
Too many zeros, not enough ones
I've seen this already, and personally, I think it's a lot of crap. What is he suggesting? That any other systems of E-mail aside from ones controlled by the USPS would be *illegal*? Frankly, I think if the USPS had their own E-mail service, things wouldn't be so different, because there's no way any court would ever hold up an order to prevent other people from running other E-mail services. Sensationalism sucks.
would keep my inbox spam free if they charged 37 cents per email
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
So does this mean we wouldn't get e-mail if it snowed?
Doh.
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.
Sorry, I find it highly unlikely that Costner could have "owned" anything
...that in many other countries outside of the US, the government postal services do indeed, if only indirectly, run the email systems. In many countries, the phone system is run by the postal service.
So the idea isn't really all that far-fetched. I would consider it a narrow miss. Things could have be even worse than they are now.
Concealed Handgun License Courses in Plano, Texas
The article talks about an electronic service where you could transmit electronic messages between roughly 25 post offices. The messages would be printed out and then hand delivered like normal mail.
Honestly I don't see how this is anything like email, which is 100% electronic.
- Why I like email? Because there's no mail man for my dog to bite.
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.
There's no way anyone could control email now adays. Some company could easily setup a server on the internet that allowed email. They would probably call it something else like the Virtual Note Sending System, something that didn't sound like "mail". People would send messages through it just like email now. What could the post office do about it? If you can getting putting swings past the government patent office, you can bs a business like this past the government postal service.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
First, more or less on-topic, and to clear up a common misconception: yes, the USPS has a monopoly on first-class mail. No, we shouldn't consider allowing competition. What most people don't know is that the USPS is mandated (by the same government that gave it the monopoly in the first place) to pick and and deliver at every address in the country every day. Think of the mind-boggling logistics behind that statement. Then realize that FedEx and UPS sometimes give their own deliveries to the USPS because they can't be bothered to go Smallville.
Second, on the Civil War remark, check out Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South , which is based on just that premise: how could the South win the Civil War, and what would happen afterwords? Very nicely done.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Process..
Email addresses are in the form
Name@Address@Town@State@Country
Printers are "conveniently located" throughout the country. Postal service works include email delivery as part of their standard round.
Could be worse though, they could have had accountants run it. Then we'd all be told how the value of the network was huge as millions of dollars of Nigerian money was being offered on a daily basis.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
This would also mean that macro viruses that send emails to your entire address list will affect the average user much more than it does now.
Aside from macro viruses, people will surely find other ways to run up someones email bill, and this is probably the reason why there are no common pay-per use services over the internet.
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.
This tells how the postman almost offered a service that had similarities with modern day e-mail.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
Eh? The Civil War wasn't about slavery. Slavery was abolished more as a punitive measure against the Southern states than as a goal of the war. Lincoln stated flatly that his goal was to preserve the Union -- whether with such preservation every slave was freed, some slaves were freed, or no slaves were freed.
Doesn't do so well for the view of the Northerners as the heroes in white, fighting to save the oppressed minority, but then neither side's motives could be called entirely pure.
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.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
yeah - it was mainly an economic war, the Emancipation Proclimation was made late in the war and didn't even free slaves in the Northern states so as not to lose the border states' support :)
Who is it at Technology Review that keeps churning out these historically-illiterate might-have-been stories? Last time it was somebody arguing that we could have had cell phones in the 1930s if it hadn't been for the KGB, or something equally absurd.
And, once again, get beat down. Maybe this time, we won't let them back in. If they kiss the presidential ring and beg for forgiveness, we'll let them become provinces. If they're lucky.
Guns of the South, is a pure fiction novel. Neo-racists use a time machine to supply the Confederates with AK-47's. Not a very reasonable premise of how they could have won.
A MUCH more realistic portrayal of how the Confederacy could have won the war, is in the pre-history to his book How Few Remain, which is a novel of the Second War Between the States, set approximately 20 years after Lincoln was forced to sign a peace treaty with the Confederacy.
The basic premise, is that early on, the South was spanking the North pretty badly. This was prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. At the time, the other countries of the world, would have viewed Lincoln issuing it, as coming from a position of weakness. And the goal would have been thought to be insurrection. In 1862, a Confedearte courier was killed and the troop deployment information he carried fell into the hands of the Union. Using this information, the Union won a solid victory at last, at Antietam. Now Lincoln could issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Once the emancipation proclamation was issued, there was a moral difference between the 2 parts of the US, and the European powers could in no way support the Confederacy.
In Turtledoves world, the couriers information was never captured by the Union. The Confederates continued to hold strong positions. Because neither of the parties in the battle was morally different, France and England then force Lincoln to negotiate a peace treaty, rather than having them join forces with the Confederates, in "punishing" the Union, and reducing the power of a growing competitor.
The book How Few Remain is actually set 20 years later, when a Second Civil War flares up. This time France and England are full allies of the CSA, and join in the party. The Union gets soundly smacked around a second time. And in an interesting twist, by the end the Union starts forging ties to the Austro-Hungarian empire. 3 years later, the "Great War" series of his kicks in. WW-I has broken out in Europe, and the Confederates, and the Union try going at each other a third time, this time, without the assistance of the Europeans who are busy with their own fight. And you have Tank, and trench warfare raging across the middle of North America.
Turtledove has built a VERY rich world. Populated by lots of names that are recognizable. All in all his fiction is VERY highly regarded.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
I've seen this already, and personally, I think it's a lot of crap. What is he suggesting? That any other systems of E-mail aside from ones controlled by the USPS would be *illegal*?
Exactly.
The USPS has a long history of using federal law to stamp out competing mail services.
The usual excuse is that it undermines fixed-rate universal service by "cherry-picking" the inespensive job of delivering mail in and between cities or their business-office cores, which subsidizes the mail in rural areas. Federal law gives them a monopoly on first class mail and its equivalents (sealed point-to-point message) and they have enforced it jealously in the past.
- Against many private competing mail carriers.
- Against bicycle couriers. (Sometimes they'd let them carry and deliver IF you also bought a stamp.)
- Against (shutting down) a pneumatic-tube package-deleivery system in Manhattan.
and so on.
I think they tried against Fax but the Bell system slapped them down. (They're a regulated monopoly.) Fedex initially got away with it because they promise overnight delivery (not available from USPS at the time) for a much HIGHER price than first-class mail.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Yawn. The states that seceded did so because they thought (rightly or wrongly) that Lincoln would be an abolitionist President. The purpose of the fighting for the North may have been to preserve the Union, but the cause of the war was Southern secession over the issue of slavery. Generations of Confederate apologists have managed to introduce some doubt on this issue into people's minds, but a reading of the letters and speeches of the time makes it clear that if not for slavery (and abolitionism, to be sure) the secession, and thus the war, would not have happened.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Seriously. Have you ever dealt with the postal service in another country? For the most part, it sucks. All too often, packages disapear. If something does arrive, it took bloody forever.
I stopped complaining about the USPS after having extensive dealings with European postal services.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Ok, I know this is slightly offtopic, but i'll say it anyway. I have read all the various news stories about how email is/will kill conventional means of post. But, i feel the internet has created a huge increase in shipping. Why? because, before the net, not many people catalog shopped, however, since the net, so many more people are ordering online, and guess what, what they order gets shipped to them. Also, dont forget eBay, lots of sellers dont accept electronic payments, so how do you get the money to them, regular snail mail.
Also, in the past, how many people actually sent letters to people, I remember the last time i mailed a letter, i was in grade school and writing to my assigned penpal.
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.
The post office is nothing but another example of failed socialism, and should be phased out and replaced with market solutions which offer an incentive to deliver (pardon the pun ;). The answer is to allow the market to supply the demand by voluntary means, instead of by coercion (the tool of government).
The South seceded because they thought Lincoln would destroy their whole way of life, not just abolish slavery, so the war started over states' rights. But, many (but not all) Northerners did think the war was about slavery, and that's why many of them signed up--I'm sure at least some of us remember Col. Chamberlain's speech to the men of the 2nd Maine in The Killer Angels or Gettysburg.
Really, I'd rather have a small amount of my tax dollars put towards a e-mail account that I know will be there for the rest of my life. (As opposed to getting a "free" account with a .com that might not be there tomorrow.) Not only that, but since it's paid for by taxes, you won't have to worry about the gov't selling your e-mail for extra $$$ (In an ideal world anyway.)
I'm not saying that the USPS should be the only one providing e-mail, but I don't think it would be the horrible thing that everyone is making it out to be.
Look, the United States Postal Service does a damn good job for the money. Bitch if you want about the thirty-seven cents, but why don't you try hiring a cab to hand-deliver your envelope door-to-door and maybe that'll give some idea what the service is really worth. The USPS has been getting a bum rap for decades now for doing nothing less than a fantastic job with shit for a budget.
The USPS is also a serious proponent of Linux, having deployed more than 5400 Linux boxes internally to do address scanning and recognition. Google for "Linux USPS", it's the first unsponsored link.
I'm trying real hard here to think how the USPS could fuck up the Internet any worse than Adelphia or Qwest, and if there is something more nefarious that they could've done, it escapes me.
As others have pointed out, the USPS could not just come in and 'own' e-mail, they could provide an e-mail service, that people would use only if it provided enough value to justify the cost.
Most likely, the main users would have been business customers, who were willing to pay for the services.
Having a central, semi-trusted authority, employing sound technologies, could have taken e-mail much farther than it is today. Features like:
- Useful encrypted e-mail (i.e. a central certificate authority, with a strong registration process).
- Based on a modern protocol with some assurances of identity. SMTP is trivial to spoof, but is so widespread it's impossible to replace. It would take an organization with some clout to promote a new open standard.
- SPAM control
When people hear of the USPS doing e-mail, they think of their local mail carriers and laugh. Obviously it would not be run by those people, it would be a group of trained specialists designing and implementing it.
Of course, I still would not trust them with my e-mail, or pay them for the service. But, I bet my employer would. And, I bet I would use the GNU version of their open standards and strong security on my Linux box.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Before the whole WorldCom shitstorm went down, I would have violently argued against the idea of treating email as a centrally-administered national resource.
Now, it looks like my pop.net email address -- for which I've been paying $20/month for the last several years on the grounds that I didn't think UUNet would ever go away -- might well become worthless before long.
I'm pissed and disillusioned at the same time. It really does appear that any sufficiently-large corporation is indistinguishable from an incompetent government. Perhaps there actually would be some value in a USPS-administered email option in the marketplace. One address, guaranteed for life, immune to the slings and arrows of corporate greed and idiocy, where spammers would have to answer to Federal postal inspectors.
Honestly, I'd probably sign up. Email may turn out to be one of those things the private sector just doesn't handle very well.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
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.
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.
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 don't think I'd want all those aliens in the post-office twiddling with my bits...
FedEX/UPS/UHL/Airborne Express don't stop regularly
Neither does my postman!
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
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.
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.
For a moment, I thought the article was going to focus on the law that states that things of a non-urgent nature must be delivered by USPS, and things like that. Interesting to find out they were looking into official electronic mail in the 70s, and interesting that the solution that finally popped up was distributed and came out of defense research.
By the way, if anyone has any information about the history of letter delivery, and especially things like the Ed Baker Memorial Postal Conspiracy or other postal conspiracies, I'd be interested in hearing from you. Unusually, lots of information is not readily available from a Google search.
Tweet, tweet.
I disagree. They would have been first to market with a technology on a massive roll-out.
Anyone competing would have to have a competing technology, unless USPS licensed it to them.
In effect, competition would fragment the market, and with the head-start the USPS had, it is very likely it would have won.
I think had the USPS actually gone ahead with the plan, we might all have very different email addresses right now (either because we would be using a fragmented service, akin to the old AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve days, or because we all use USPS addresses.)
It's sort of like picking on a younger sibling, but standing up for them whenever someone else does the same. I can call my best friend a redneck, but wouldn't let you do the same. :)
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
So we would have had mass propogation of email earlier, and a internet or the internet type of services would have happened sooner. Bar the internet would not have had its libertarian nature if the post office ran it.
But we might have had more interactive high bandwidth services sooner if the plan had gone forward.
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.
The USPS's lifeblood is unsolicited commercial advertising mail.
That's certainly true, but they damned sure don't deliver it for free, do they? Imagine what would happen to a bulk mailer who misappropriated USPS resources to bury millions of people in junk mail without paying a dime of postage.
If there were a way to make spammers pay for the resources they use, the volume of unsolicited commercial email would drop by at least 95% overnight.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
"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)
Only it isn't going to happen because the government doesn't like encryption and the post office is (probably) too clueless to actually set up the necessary servers and keep them secure enough for it all to work.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
Before widespread DNS and the MX tag, email addresses looked like...
myneighbor!herfriend!uunet!yahoo!slew
No kidding, email addresses used to be the other way with rmail/uucp! (and for a small time when internet email was just starting to be popular it was both ways with % signs, not to mention other nasty hpmail/vaxmail/x.400/x.500 hybrids)
You had to source route your email explicitly although uunet was pretty good about knowing about big sites and was pretty reasonable about relaying a small amount of email for a small fee. Setting up email w/o DNS (and root servers) might be like gnutella without much bandwidth. Think of DNS root server as the virtual site that can automatically tell you where to find out how to route everything.
The only reason email is as popular as it is today is that interoperability is pretty common (except for the spam-sources). Imagine if say 1/2 the email addresses uses a proprietary postoffice maintained "dns-like" service... It would sort of be like if the post office didn't license zip-codes to be used by their competitors (sort of how they don't let fedex/ups send to p.o.boxes)... You could set up a separate internet email, but there would be no interop...
Just food for thought...
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
I can't ever recall not getting my mail :)
Would it be worse if the Post Office controlled the domains and routing than it is now ? The various groups we've appointed to safegaurd the net have for the most part been corporatized, or lobotamized by the real power, $$$$$.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Like $0 Web hosting. For less than $20 year in DNS registration fees, you can have you@youraddr.com and give nine friends an address@youraddr.com as well, not to mention Web hosting.
I'd much rather get to choose my own domain than have to be @usps.com.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
And I'd get all of my neighbor's printouts... and all of the printouts for the previous owners.
In the UK it was illegal for electronic communications to be done except through the GPO (Post Office, which at one stage also owned the phone company). When I as at Cambridge university in the 1970s there was a legal problem with email. Email (communication between people) within one building was OK, but between different (university) sites was not. The undersity legal dons found a way round it (someone interacted with a computer, which happened to interact with someone else), but AFIR it was never tested - the GPO did not know.
A decade later: Unix and UUCP (remember that). We built a dialup network through high speed modems 300 (baud). It mostly carried news & mail. There was a legal problem - we weren't allowed to communicate electronically with anyone, so we joined a club the UKUUG (UK Unix User Group), we were thus a closed community and so it was OK (the exact legal mumbo jumbo escapes me). Because of this UKUUG membership grew rapidly.
Things have moved on & it doesn't appear to be necessary anymore, but I don't know how the law has changed -- I don't care as long as I can do it.
Then the South fights in a war costing hundreds of thousands of lives over the issue of "high taxes".
Then for almost 100 years further, it continues to ensure cheap labor by continuing with the biggest subset of the condition slavery it can get away with.
Sounds mainly like avoiding hard moral choices in favor of grabbing a few bucks. That's not setting a very high "holy" bar to beat.
To say that any particular thing caused any war would be simplistic. People fight in wars for their own reasons, which can be quite varied. Often, soldiers on opposing sides have completely different ideas about what a war is about. Read this.
In fact, having the USPS run Email and have it subjected to the same laws and regulations as standard mail would almost certainly provide you with MORE spam and more headaches.
While you paid 1 penny to send an email, mass mailers would get massive discounts, like 1/10 of a penny.
The USPS would be required by law to deliver any mail addressed to you, or any mail vaugly resembling your address. account_owner@domain.com would by law HAVE to be delivered to every email account in the "domain.com" domain.
The USPS would sell your email address to mass marketers, and be required to publish your address in a master list that is available to almost anyone who asks for it.
Further, the USPS would actively encourage mass mailers to send you bulk advertzing to increase their revenue stream.
Email messages would have no ability to be tracked. They would dissapear in to the system, and would usually show up at the proper destination. The contents of your message may have been damaged in transit, or the message unexpectedly delayed for days or weeks.
The 1 penny rate would only apply to messages of 1KB in size. Larger messages would be charged extra. Discounts would apply for "media" email that contained images, book transcripts, video, or sound files.
The machines that recieve the email would have to be certified by the USPS. If any system failed to meet the approval of the USPS they could confiscate it, or refuse to deliver mail to it.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
Well, the Deutsche Post AG (the German counterpart of the USPS) does offer a free(!) email service called "ePost" just like Hotmail, Yahoo, web.de, GMX and many others. However, they don't seem to have a lot of users; one does rarely see an ePost email address (*@epost.de).
Claus
We would probably now have somthing like this:
Claus
i watch ally mcbeal and i have never once gotten the urge to starve myself so I can be skinny. if this is the true reason why women in fiji were becoming anorexic in droves, than perhaps they need better parenting or psychologists in fiji. While I am not one to like america (after living in the us for 22 years and moving to europe i can finally see USA how the rest of the world sees it), I will defend them here. You can't blame "America" rising to power (news flash... america may have power, but not as much as americans think) for the outbreak of anorexia in fiji!
... we're just re-arming and waiting for the right opportunity.
...
If at first you don't secede
In spite of the trolling title, nothing in the article even implies that the USPS even considered "owning" or controlling the email delivery infrastructure. It says that there was a point where it could have bought much of the telegraph infrastructure (but it didn't), and there was a point where it could have offered email services, but decided it was out of their mandate.
If, in 1982 they decieded to offer electronic mail services, they would have found UUCP
and BITNet already there, connecting colleges, government agencies, and some companies with electronic mail and other services. Businessmen and power users with money were already sending electronic mail through services like Compuserve and The Source.
I don't see anything the USPS could have done to stop the rise of FidoNet in 1984. FidoNet allowed anybody to call up a local BBS system (which was often free), and send an email that could get routed internationally, or to any of the other email networks.
The bottom line is, there is no way short of draconian legislation that would have allowed the USPS to "own" email. The most that could have happened is for them to offer email to customers; customers who have other options that the post office must compete with. Kind of like package delivery: the USPS offers package delivery service, but as any employee of FedEx, UPS or DHL will tell you, they by no means own the service.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Hmm, I always thought it was a war for Southern Independence, the CSA never tried to take over the union from what I know...
~ now you know
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.
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
The USPS already does have an Electronic Postmark service.
The Spanish Correos y Telégrafos has a partnership with Yahoo.
You could get a Yahoo Mail address through the Correos website. I don't know what Correos got out from the deal.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu