1981: U.S. Postal Service announces E-COM email | Hacker News Reader

1981: U.S. Postal Service announces E-COM email

stampsjoann.net

31 pointsmikecane11 comments

There is still a USPS product today which does this net-to-junk mail gateway. It is a usability cluster flop, but the core value prop is good: why print 10 million pieces of mail in California to deliver to St. Louis when you can have a computer in St. Louis do the mail merge and save literally a ton of freight?

I used the customer-facing version to send letters to banks when cleaning up credit issues. (For a variety of reasons, paper works better for this.) It actually worked out to being more expensive to have the Post Office print and deliver 20 PDFs than to do it myself and airmail them 6,000 miles each, but it saved me a trip to the post office.

the core vale prop is good: why print 10 million pieces of mail in Calif. to deliver to St. Louis when you can have a computer in St. Louis do the mail merge and save literally a ton of freight?

At first glance it may make sense to have mail originate from twenty proximate, regional post offices, rather than one point in California. There are scale issues here though, and believe me, nowhere but the print shop are your costs so affected by scale - it is the #1 factor by a long shot. Printing 10 million pieces in one place then mailing around the country, surprisingly, is very often cheaper than printing 500,000 pieces in 20 places despite not having to mail the stuff as far.

This is exactly correct, assuming you're printing offset rather than digitally (e.g. on an Indigo.) Offset printing has tremendous economies of scale, making it FAR cheaper in most cases to print once and drop ship to various SCFs than to print multiple times.

I learn something new every day. Thanks.

I recall at one point that AOL would do this - I guess enough clueless people tried putting a mailing address into the "To" box that they decided to just go with it instead of dealing with one more class of bizarre support call.

Cached: http://stampsjoann.net.nyud.net/E-COM/E-Com-Mail.html

I also seem to remember seeing the Automated Postal Center machines (the vending machines for stamps and scales and things) in post offices long before I saw automated cashiers in grocery stores everywhere. There's a lot of things going against USPS right now, but finding extremely usable technology that's casually ahead of its time doesn't seem to be one of them.

Cached (other cache is down too): http://web.archive.org/web/20080905140834/http://stampsjoann...

Ha, is that a VT100 terminal?

With all the women shown in mainframe/miniframe ads, you think more women would have gone into programming back then. However I guess there aren't too many women in autorepair today despite all the car tool calendars, ahem.

A reminder that we should be thankful for the academic orgins of the winning Internet standards. We could live in a world of fragmented protocols and pay walls at every turn. Instead we live in a world where the hacker standard prevails - that everything should be free unless it is truly a unique value add.

Imagine if Linux or BSD had been positioned such that they won the consumer OS war. Now imagine if AOL won the war for consumer Internet standards. Some may argue, but I believe this could have happened had TCP/IP and HTML not landed full force with as such an open, powerful, and stable alternative - largely due to years of academic and scientific influence.

AOL failed to adopt the way Microsoft did, and the open Internet was already compelling as a consumer experience, so they would have had a more difficult time competing - but it might have happened.

Had the same occurred for consumer OS, we could live in a different world of open desktop standards. We appear to be headed that way 30 years later through the browser, but it's going to take at least another 5 or 10 years to supplant proprietary desktop OSes.

We do have a similar battle going on for the mobile platform. I'm an avid Apple user and fan, but I'm rooting ultimately for HTML5 as the standard for developing apps. Let's just hope it's good enough to compete.

Back in Germany: http://www.epost.de/

absolutely no spam, free fax, free and secure mail, free sms when you get a letter, no letter will ever get lost, perfect authentification, perfect encryption, any email can become a registered mail; including pdf files or for businesses even DVD and CD-ROM, perfect for e-government &banks, backup for all documents and if you are blind services are for free. The catch? You need a mobile phone, because if you change password, your profile or anything like that you are sent a TAN. If you log in you are told when you logged in the last time including your IP.

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