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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 ? .
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Hm, yes, so scary. What on earth would it be like if the USPS had offered the first e-mail service?
- USPS has very strict government regulations regarding privacy. Less distribution of your email address.
- USPS is non-profit. Less *motivation* to sell your email address. We wouldn't get more spam... instead, we'd be reasonably sure that if we never gave out our email addresses, we'd never get *any* spam. Not so with many (most?) of today's ISPs.
- Post offices are literally everywhere in the country. People who currently find email inacessible because they're in the boondocks might not be in this situation.
Fact is, if the post office had gone ahead with development of electronic mail, it probably would have been a lot like the proprietary services (i.e. AOL, CompuServe) before the internet boom. ARPA still would have seen a need for the internet, they still would have gone to university research (TCP/IP was invented at a public institution, with government money... and look how horrible it turned out), and USPS along with everyone else would have been scrambling to make themselves compatible with it.
The worst possible thing I can think of is that maybe those millions of AOL subscribers who currently have no concept of what the internet is, but manage to rampage across it anyway, would instead be USPS subscribers. Would that really be worse?
government != evil.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Great, just what I wanted, a disgrunteled postal worker handling all my E-Mail
As opposed to one of us happy, well-balanced sysadmins? :)
"Are you being weird, or sarcastic?" said Emma. I said I didn't know because I get the two feelings mixed up.
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