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Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

You do wonder why post offices - everywhere - not just in the US - have not done something with electronic delivery.

If I was Postmaster General I would like to see a post office ISP that only accepted mail from government departments, local authorities, banks, hospitals, doctors, schools and other agencies. From there people could setup a forwarding address - if people wanted to just check their mail from one account, e.g. gmail, they could have the 'important stuff' rolled into it. Or they could setup POP/IMAP.

There could also be a webmail where you would be able to have highest accessibility standards. Clearly the cryptography would have to be in place so only the sender and the recipient could read the mail - a 'virtual envelope'. Naturally there would be tracking tags so they knew if someone had read that 'final demand'.

As a competitive service for banks etc. wanting to send out statements it could work very nicely. Good for trees, too.

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The Swedish post does it. They already have a "companies electronically send us a PDF and we print, envelope and mail it to end customers" service, so the idea is that instead of printing it they can just forward it on to your electronic postbox. Not many agencies/companies have signed up to use it (only about 100-200 from the looks of it), so it's still pretty useless to me. http://www.posten.se/sv/Privat/epostboxen/Sidor/home.aspx

There's a separate one run by the Swedish IRS, and I've gotten a few letters from them to it http://minameddelanden.se

There's also a private service, but it also suffers from poor support - I think I've only gotten mail from a credit reporting agency there https://www.kivra.com

Why not just start with "virtual" PO boxes? Instead of addressing letters to a physical mailbox, people who want to send me mail should address them to some unique identifier that means me the person.

I would then go and tell the post office what address that identifier maps to, and I would never have to worry about forwarding mail when I move or updating my address whenever I buy something. You need the post office involved here so you don't end up shipping packages twice, like with traditional forwarding services.

Once you have THAT infrastructure, creating a service to digitize mail becomes much simpler - whether done by the post office or third parties.

Congress prevented it.

The Post Office tried to become a sort of "digital hub" for rural areas (bill paying, faxing, etc.). That got quashed.

Congress is not interested in a good Post Office. Quite the contrary. They want the Post Office to go bankrupt so that they can get their hands on all of the really expensive real estate it is sitting on.

Canada has epost which is a crypto vault to hold bank or gov mail you can give other people access . Nobody here proposed the scheme of this article's opening of all mail though, that's illegal to do without a warrant due to hundreds year old laws. A nice reminder that once upon a time our ancestors rejected state surveillance.

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