The US Postal Service and E-mail

So I was listening to this story on NPR this morning about the problems the US Postal Service has been facing recently, and I wondered to myself why they never set up an e-mail service like Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo did years ago, to get a step ahead of the competition as well as to give them another revenue-generating source outside of snailmail postage. So I did what I normally do when I think of shit like this, I hopped on the Internet this morning and did a quick search for “US Postal Service” and email, and this is what I found:

File this under “strange but true:” The United States Postal Service came close to administering email.

(If you’re really cynical about your mail-delivery service, you might think this would be the ultimate email-horror story. Not me. I get excellent service, and not just because I accidentally leave bakery next to the mailbox every Christmas.)

An entertaining story in the MIT Technology Review by Stuart N. Brotman, who was assistant to President Jimmy Carter’s chief communications policy adviser from 1978 to 1981, recounts the Postal Service’s experiments with electronic communication over the years and how they led to the Postal Service’s involvement with email.

The Post Office Department, the quasi-private Postal Service’s government precursor, has been involved in advanced communications technology since it began operating a telegraph line between Washington D.C. and Baltimore in 1845, Brotman wrote.

Many potential innovations, such as postal telegram delivery and various forms of facsimile communications, were stymied either by Western Union or government actions. Then, the Postal Reform Act of 1970 came along, which mandated the Postal Service to “promote modern and efficient operations and [avoid] any practice which restricts the user of new equipment or devices which may reduce the cost or improve the quality of postal services…”

How did Brotman enter the picture? In the 1970s, he wrote, he said the Postal Service “could be a logical manager of a household electronic message delivery system” but warned it “has not developed the skills to capitalize on whatever its charter may allow in the telecommunications area.”

Then the Postal Service introduced E-COM, aimed mainly at big-business mailers, and alarm bells rang. Brotman fired off an op-ed piece in the New York Times and soon got an answer from William F. Bolger, then Postmaster General, which said, in part, that email “is the proper domain of the telecommunications industry. Our mandate for 206 years has been the delivery of hard-copy messages. That will remain our function.”

Brotman’s account tells the story in more colorful detail.

So there you have it. They fucked themselves from the get-go.