**P.O. box on Net for everyone
Universal e-mail in postal plans
July 10, 2000
BLOOMBERG NEWS
WASHINGTON **-- The U.S. Postal Service would like to create a secure e-mail address for each person in the country that would also allow people to track and reroute their regular mail over the Internet, postal officials said.
The postal agency would be able to notify a customer by e-mail about an incoming package or a bill, and the customer could order the Postal Service to redirect the mail to different addresses through the Internet, said Deputy Postmaster General John Nolan in an interview.
“We have a tremendous opportunity to create value on the Internet, and because of our ubiquity, to help people do business on the Internet,” Nolan said.
The futuristic system, still in the planning stages…
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Each person in the U.S. could be assigned an e-mail address associated with the person’s regular street address. It would include the person’s initials, followed by the nine-digit zip code, the last two numbers of the street address, with .usps.com tagged on the end.
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Fears about the privacy of an online Postal Service system that integrates physical and electronic addresses are overblown, said Nolan, who was operations chief for Merrill Lynch & Co.'s print and mail business for 10 years before being appointed deputy postmaster general.
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Products currently in design include a secure individual electronic mail box for storage of e-mail and electronic data, and “hybrid mail,” where mailers can transmit newsletters, correspondence and other first class mail through the Postal Service to contract printers. Nolan said the success of hybrid mail in Ireland and Canada motivated the post office to give it a try.
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This spring, the Post Office rolled out a bill paying system that uses the Postal Service Web site as a secure link to pay bills through CheckFree Holdings Corp., competing with a plethora of bill-paying services such as PayMyBills.com and Intuit Inc.'s Cyberbills. Almost one-third of the Postal Service’s annual revenue, $17 billion, comes from bill payments sent by mail.
The Postal Service is already a beneficiary of electronic commerce in one area – deliveries. In competition with private companies such as United Parcel Service Inc. and FedEx Corp., it delivered one third of all merchandise ordered online in 1998 and is the shipper of choice for Amazon.com and EddieBauer.com.
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Eh, don’t worry about it too much. Speaking as somebody with an “in” at the USPS, nobody listens to “postal officials” much, especially when they call press conferences and make overblown sci-fi announcements.
They can’t even get the much-hyped billion-dollar OCR reader/sorter to work right. There’s no way they’ll even get close to implementing this kind of e-mail thing; they’re just blowin’ smoke to make it seem like they’re keeping up with the FedEx Joneses.
Well… the addressing scheme proposed is quite stupid. Why would you base an email address on a geographical location? That’s going backwards. Rather… every U.S. resident should have a uniform person locator (UPL) which can be used to address any package whether physical or electronic.
The whole postal system is electronic anyway. It could handle the address translation. And this would mean that when Jane Doe moved cross-country, she wouldn’t need to send out 18,000 change of address forms. (Of course local businesses could still address things by their snail-mail address, in the same way that IP addresses can be used to route packets today.)
second, this was the second posting of this persons’ that seemed, shall we say, a bit off (the other was asking if belief in ghosts, leprachans and UFOs was being “good religion”), so I did a search of this person’s 17 posts. couldn’t do it. neither by clicking on their profile nor by an independant search.
PLUS 17 posts (two at least independant threads) in one day???
to quote “curiouser and curiouser”
[Fixed link to GQ thread – Alphagene]
Of course it’s my answer to other thread.
What kind of idiot are you?
I wanted my own thread to bitch about it. Can’t do that on the other forum. You’ve been here since July? and don’t know that yet?
And what’s curious about ghosts? Maybe you’re an athiest, but not me. You want to debate religion, go to great debates. I guess you don’t know that either.
What an asshole you are. You want a piece of me, tell me where you live and I’ll show you what I’ve got. Fucking loser!
And 17 posts in one day? You think that’s a fucking record?
What a shit you are. If you don’t like to post, why did you come here? What a whiner. You really are a baby.
I guess I don’t like to see a newbie get whomped during his first 20 minutes out of the box:
Yeah, so, he saw something in GQ that made him mad and he came over to the Pit and started a thread about it. So?
What’s wrong with 17 posts in one day? Many of us post even more frequently.
What’s wrong with asking questions about ghosts, etc.? It seems a bit “off” to you, to be talking about leprechauns? This isn’t Mr. Wizard; many of us enjoy talking about UFOs and other weird stuff.
You sounds as though your suspicions are aroused (suspicions of what, is not clear) by the fact that the Search function doesn’t turn up any of his other posts. How long have YOU been here, anyway? And you haven’t noticed that the SDMB Search function is notoriously picky about what you put in the fields? Are you accusing him of being a mutant, with post-deleting abilities?
And yes, it’s definitely a hijack. But we usually forgive them if they have a point, or are otherwise interesting. This one is borderline, babe. What’s your beef, anyway?
I was wondering if anybody saw this contradiction but me.
And would YOU trust that there will never be another Nixon or J. Edgar Hoover to really rake you over for politics or sexual orientation or red sympathies, or the next scare.
It’s just too much, and we’re all going to pay for it for years, whether it works or not.
That is so odd. I’ve never been able to get names with spaces to work in the serch engine, but you’re right, they do work. I just tried several and they works. I also tried several with numbers and they seemed to work. Maybe this is a case where there is a space before the name that we can’t see. That would screw up the search engine, I would think.
