Snail Mail Meets E-mail
The folks who deliver mail the old-fashioned way want to help you use the Internet to track that Mother's Day card or simply email it to Mom's house.
Worried that email and online bill-paying could take a fatal bite out of first-class mail in coming years, the Postal Service is testing a variety of e-services for Americans, including one that would assign virtually everybody an email address.
Customers could be notified by email about an incoming bill or package, which they could then reroute to another street address.
Another service, set to begin a three-year consumer test next month, would allow customers to send emails to a post office to be printed and delivered as first-class mail - much like a service already provided by a private company.
A third program, already available, lets customers pay bills online through the Postal Service's Web site.
Postal Service spokeswoman Sue Brennan called the projects "a way for customers to choose how they want to get their correspondence."
The post office predicts that in 2003, first-class mail, now a $35 billion business and its top revenue-producing service, will begin an unprecedented decline at the hands of booming email and online billing services.
Under its own online bill system, the Postal Service charges customers $6 per month to send 20 electronic transactions, or $2 per month and 40 cents apiece for unlimited transactions.
The email-to-paper system would cost about 41 cents per message - 8 cents more than current 33-cent postage.
Under the emailbox proposal, virtually every American would be assigned a free email address corresponding to their street address. Customers could simply link the service to any current email address they have, or opt for a special online postal box. Customers could then get an email address using their initials, followed by their nine-digit ZIP code and the last two numbers of their street address with "usps.com" tacked at the end.
A new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that more than 90 million people have Internet access. Of those, about 84 million use email regularly, while 16 million have used some sort of online banking service.
But followers of e-commerce had mixed reactions to the postal email proposal.
"They're in catch-up mode," said Donald Heath, president of the nonprofit Internet Society, based in Reston, Va. "It sounds like they're not in touch with the reality of the Internet at this point." Heath said most people who would use the service already have email, and that the rest probably wouldn't log on for the tracking service.
"As schemes go, this one isn't bad," said Rob Enderle of Giga Information Group, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based technology research firm. "It absolutely makes sense; they are in the business of delivering mail, and email is a form of mail. So ignoring that mode is way of making yourself obsolete."
In 1998 the Postal Service began testing a kind of certified email service called PostECS, which sends electronic receipts for contracts and other important documents transmitted over the Internet.
Last year, it rolled out its heralded online postage system. The Postal Service says 280,000 customers have printed $22.6 million worth of "online stamps" since July 1999, but the service has yet to deliver a profit.
Gene Johnson, chief executive officer of Mail2000, a Bethesda, Md., company that translates email messages into first-class mail, said customers would probably find little use for the Postal Service email tracking system, but insisted that reports of the death of first-class mail are greatly exaggerated.