7 ms·

E-COM: The $40M USPS project to send email on paper

120 points by rfarley04 1y ago

calvinmorrison 1y ago
now the junk mail subsidizes USPS. I wonder if they could be profitable without all the credit card preapprovals in the mail.
- j_w 1y ago
  USPS doesn't technically need to be profitable. It's a service guaranteed by the Government. Government services do not need to turn a profit. Yes, currently the service is expected to fund itself. This is short sighted and has progressively made one of the greatest public services worse.
  - giancarlostoro 1y ago
    Sure, but then when something goes severely wrong, you wind up thinking of things to better fund USPS. I think USPS doesn't need to be aggressively profitable, but it should at least aim towards being as self-sufficient as reasonably possible. I don't see an issue with this.
    - Goronmon 1y ago
      Sure, but then when something goes severely wrong, you wind up thinking of things to better fund USPS. This logic could be applied to literally anything, so your argument is effectively that the government should never fund anything. If there is a war, cancer/disease research is going to be less important, so the government shouldn't fund cancer/disease research. If suddenly a famine strikes, war is going to be less important, so the government shouldn't fund the military. If a sudden deadly disease arises, funding for food security/research is going to be less important, so the government shouldn't be funding any of that as well.
      - robertlagrant 1y ago
        You're straw-manning their argument to be much more all or nothing than it is. Definitely if there's a total war economy, there's going to be less money for other things, even if that thing is "keeping future inflation in the single digits".
        potato3732842 1y ago
        Exactly. Nobody expects the welfare office to be self sufficient, what are they gonna do, charge all the recipients? But a mail and parcel service, something that the private sector does profitably, shouldn't be deeply in the red though a little from time to time is probably fine.
        fragmede 1y ago
        On the other hand though, if the private parcel service had to fund 40 years of pensions instead of giving out 401k's, and were obligated to serve unprofitable routes, they'd be deeply in the red. It's not a remotely level playing field, so it's no wonder the government parcel service is having problems.
        potato3732842 1y ago
        I wouldn't consider the USPS to be deeply in the red when compared with other government operations.
        fragmede 1y ago
        deeply in the red is your phrase, not mine
        robertlagrant 1y ago
        > It's not a remotely level playing field What's causing the unlevel playing field?
    - fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
      The downstream benefits of a well functioning USPS could be worth running it at a loss. If efforts to make it profitable make the service worse, then it could be a net negative.
    - jgeada 1y ago
      And the perverse incentive of this direction of thinking is that when you elect people with this thought pattern they prove the point by sabotaging the service. Then they say "see, government is ineffective ", and either directly pocket the resulting money (corruption) or give it to their rich friends (oligarchy).
    - fzzzy 1y ago
      You obviously haven't lived in rural america.
      - dfxm12 1y ago
        On a side note related to your comment, just one side benefit of urbanization would be more efficient delivery of services (including delivery services). Thankfully, the government guarantees it will deliver letters to some remote rural places at a price private companies can't touch, but we can do better to make life easier for everyone: the mail man, the people wanting their mail, etc.
        fzzzy 1y ago
        I agree that urbanization makes delivery much more efficient. My point was that if USPS goes away, there are many areas of rural america that simply won't be served because it is too expensive.
  - orwin 1y ago
    Could USPS offer limited check accounts and debit cards? I've been twice now in WV, in counties so far away from everything, the only government presence is USPS. The only proof you're in the modern US is USPS (and a bit further a weird, small public library near a weirder Dollar tree). Some people have trouble getting their retirement money, other are destitute who found a new, non-homeless life (but have trouble with debt collection or just lost their papers), And from what I've understood, USPS has buildings and employees present everywhere and is really trusted in those deep parts, more than anything the government does. Wouldn't offering basic banking (and maybe limited but free internet access) be a nice addition to help the poorest in the US? Just an idle thought I had for a while
    - moduspol 1y ago
      I'm from WV. I always figured Wal-Mart would pick it up eventually, but I think there may be laws that make that difficult.
      - justin66 1y ago
        I imagine the question is how much money there would be in it for Wal-Mart.
        jdeibele 1y ago
        A lot of stores in the US used to take payments for utility companies. The idea was that as long as you were there paying that, you'd be tempted to buy things from the store. Paying by check in the mail put a huge dent in this and then having the utility automatically debit your account pretty much put an end to it from what I've seen. I'm sure there are some areas where it still is a thing but they'd also have a high number of people without bank accounts. For a while, utilities would only debit checking accounts, presumably because ACH payments are so much cheaper than credit card ones. A few years, they opened up to credit card payments. There seem to be a lot of people who do everything on credit cards and they must have had to change with the times.
        1y ago
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    >Yes, currently the service is expected to fund itself. This is short sighted I could not disagree more. While I agree they don't "need" to be profitable and we "could" just give them tax money the fact that they try to be in the face of competition and come pretty close to doing so despite some dumb requirements really results in an incentive structure that puts them head and shoulders above pretty much any other subsection of government one interacts with. So perhaps let's not remove the incentive for profitability. Edit: And before anyone tries to construe this as me advocating for privatization or anything else like that, I'm saying they're fine the way they are (on a macro level, I'm sure there's tons of individual items that could use refinement, like any organization) and ought to be a model for other government functions. >and has progressively made one of the greatest public services worse. What? Are you joking? Have you ever tried to do anything other than a bog standard transaction at the DMV or get anything beyond typical "homeowner pays professional to do typical thing" type work permitted? The USPS is one of the most user friendly services in existence even once you get off the beaten path of sending standardized envelopes and parcels. If you restrict the comparison to just federal services it's not even close except perhaps some very specific common workflows but even then when it goes off the rails it goes off the rails way harder and is way more painful to resolve. Ask anyone of social security age if you don't believe me.
  - kochb 1y ago
    Either it is able to fully fund itself through sender fees and other operations, or the net losses are ultimately paid for by other government revenues, primarily taxes. I enjoy Christmas cards and personal letters as much as anyone, but with electronic payments and telecommunications taking more of the volume, it is increasingly becoming an advertising service. If it is operating unprofitably, we are paying a form of subscription fee to receive those ads.
    - nxobject 1y ago
      More charitably, it's a cost-sharing scheme for last-mile delivery to rural communities and deep suburban sprawl – as, to be fair, is often true for other rural services with significant federal funding like healthcare and higher education.
      - dfxm12 1y ago
        At some point, we should do what we can to promote urbanization. Being able to deliver government services more efficiently is one benefit.
        jermaustin1 1y ago
        A lot of the people who don't want to live in urban/suburban areas also view "government services" as a bad thing to begin with. Probably because they've never had good access to services.
        dfxm12 1y ago
        I think they view government services as a bad thing for a few reasons, despite having access to good government services. These two stick out to me: The ubiquitous conservative media bombards them with lies about the quality, quantity and cost of these services, along with who receives the benefits. They also haven't taken a step back to consider all the things they enjoy that are provided as government services, like roads, police, education, subsidized mail delivery, unemployment, support for dairy products, etc.
  - TheJoeMan 1y ago
    This creates a market discontinuity by the government that leads to abuse. Part of the reason for Amazon's dominance is that USPS undercharges for package delivery. When Amazon rolled out their own delivery service, they optimize delivering the "cheap" packages, and making USPS deliver the "expensive" out of the way packages, and due to flat-rates, USPS was in the red. USPS's solution? Keep squeezing grandma who wants to mail a few first-class letters a year.
    - BenjiWiebe 1y ago
      Maybe in some places, but in our rural area (Durham, Kansas) 95%+ of Amazon packages are delivered by UPS.
  - kbolino 1y ago
    It actually was profitable for most of its existence. It zealously guarded its monopoly on first-class mail because that's where the money came from. And it did so before it was spun out as a quasi-private entity. This is actually one of the challenges of public services in the US today; many things, from mail delivery to bus and train service to road construction and vehicle registration, were once self-sufficient but haven't been for a long time. There's a lot of reasons for this, but one of the outcomes is that entities which used to take care of themselves now have to beg for a growing portion out of the general fund. However, it's clear that the 1970s experiment to have it turn a profit again didn't work and likely never would have worked (it was, in many ways, set up for failure).
    - jermaustin1 1y ago
      For the USPS, it would be profitable if it wasn't required to self-fund and pre-fund all retirement benefits for current and future employees 75 years in advance, paying for retirement health care for "workers" who aren't in the workforce, or even born yet. It was a political ploy to force the USPS into debt in 2006 with the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act. No other federal agency or private sector business pre-funds its retirement benefits.
      - kbolino 1y ago
        That requirement was repealed in 2022. The USPS still isn't profitable. While it reaped the benefit of that repeal and reported only a small loss in 2022, it reported much larger losses in 2023 and 2024, comparable to its loss in 2021 (when the requirement was still in effect).
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        strongpigeon 1y ago
        Last quarter was slightly profitable [0], but yeah the losses in 2023 were pretty big. https://about.usps.com/what/financials/financial-conditions-results-reports/fy2025-q1.pdf https://about.usps.com/what/financials/financial-conditions-...
- kotaKat 1y ago
  To be fair, all the credit card preapprovals in the mail help ensure every last American is reached by mail, even if it means by mule train. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/06/mule-mail-delivery-supai-arizona/682619/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/06/mule-ma... https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/06/mule-mail-delivery-supai-arizona/682619/ https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.theatla...
nashashmi 1y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- malfist 1y ago
  Who are you to decide how I get my mail?
  - dust42 1y ago
    You do yourself. This service exists in Germany and likely in many other countries since a quarter of a century. Cost: 15€/month. The paper letters are collected and once per month forwarded to you. [1] https://www.deutschepost.de/en/p/postscan.html https://www.deutschepost.de/en/p/postscan.html (english version)
    - bobmcnamara 1y ago
      Literally paying the government to read your mail :)
      - inkspotch 1y ago
        Too late.
    - soco 1y ago
      It was 10CHF/month in Switzerland, I activated it during longer vacations only.
    - malfist 1y ago
      OP did not phrase it as optional.
      - nashashmi 1y ago
        Correction: I did say “for a service fee”. You can’t force change on transferring from a medium to another medium en masse, particularly when the service needs info for opt in.
oldpersonintx 1y ago
[dead]
citizenfishy 1y ago
I developed so many similar services for the UK Royal Mail in the 1990's We used Yellow Royal Mail branded envelopes to gain attention.
- maguay 1y ago
  Would love to hear more about your experience! Any chance you'd be up for an interview on the Buttondown blog?
  - citizenfishy 1y ago
    Happy to, find me on LinkedIN - Dave Barter CEO Nautoguide
dmix 1y ago
> The Postal Rate Commission took 15 months to review E-COM—long enough that standard postage went up 5¢ in the interim. It barred the USPS from operating its own electronic networks, just in case the Post Office decided to deliver messages electronically and in print. And it raised the price on the service to 26¢ for the first page, plus 5¢ for a second page. > Sending the messages wouldn’t be simple, either. Customers had to register their company with the USPS using Form 5320, pay a $50 annual fee, send a minimum of 200 messages per post office, and “prepay postage for transmitted messages received, processed, and printed for each transmission,” dictated the 1981 Federal Register. Almost sounds like a parody
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
So that people can discuss the US Postal service intelligently. About 15 years ago, there was a service (Outbox) designed to scan your mail, email anything important to you, and discard junk mail. They were growing, people enjoyed the service, and then they went to Washington DC to talk to the Postmaster General about expanding nationwide. https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/outbox-vs-usps-how-the-post-office-killed-digital-mail/ https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/outbox-vs-usps-how-the-po... >When Evan and Will got called in to meet with the postmaster general, they were joined by the USPS’ general counsel and chief of digital strategy. But instead, Evan recounts that Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe “looked at us” and said “we have a misunderstanding. ‘You disrupt my service and we will never work with you.'” Further, “You mentioned making the service better for our customers; but the American citizens aren’t our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our customers. Your service hurts our ability to serve those customers.'” That's the US mail. Can we all please stop pretending that any actual human needs the US mail to continue? No one's paying their bills through the mail... you can't even really write checks. Hell, given how international mail works, it's the US government subsidizing Aliexpress and Temu. No one should be defending the US Postal Service.
- chneu 1y ago
  The USPS does a lot more than ship junk mail. It's a fun joke but it's super ignorant. It speaks to idiots, everyone else rolls their eyes and thinks you're not very bright. It's a public service. It doesn't need to turn a profit because every dollar put into it generates economic activity.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
    >The USPS does a lot more than ship junk mail. It's a fun joke but Junk mail is well over 99% of their activity by any metric you can offer. Pieces of mail, revenue, weight, etc. It's not a joke. It's the fucking truth of it. And you're all bizarrely delusional if you can't or won't see it. >everyone else rolls their eyes and thinks you're not very bright. I've experienced that all my life. And yet I always out-tested everyone who thought that. Why would that change? The comment above yours talks about how he's always paying by check... what the fuck is grandpa going to do in the next couple years when that goes away? They can only postpone the deprecation of paper bank checks for so long. Guess he will either have to stop living in the 1950s, or just croak. >It's a public service. It's a goddamned public nuisance. >It doesn't need to turn a profit because every dollar put into it generates economic activity. ??? We could also pay them to dig holes and fill them back in. That'd be an economic win too, eh? Though your comment probably comes closest to hinting at the real justification: a unionized voting bloc that without it the Democrats would become doomed to irrelevance.
jdietrich 1y ago
This kind of service does have at least one very valuable niche application - armed forces personnel on active deployment. During the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, British troops received hundreds of thousands of letters every month through the e-bluey service. Letters could be sent via email (including attachments) and were printed as close as possible to the recipient. It greatly reduced logistics costs and improved speed of delivery, often facilitating next-day delivery to extremely remote Forward Operating Bases. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Forces_Post_Office#The_%22e-Bluey%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Forces_Post_Office#The... It isn't an entirely novel idea - during the Second World War, mail was often sent to very remote destinations on microfilm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-mail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-mail
- Gud 1y ago
  Why didn’t the service personnel have access to their e-mail? I was in Afghanistan for a different country. It was my job to keep the satellite communications working, including so people could send emails to their friends and family.
  - jdietrich 1y ago
    >Why didn’t the service personnel have access to their e-mail? Because they weren't in one of the larger bases that had satellite internet. Combat troops in the wilds of Helmand might go weeks without seeing a fresh egg or a slice of bread. Satellite terminals circa 2002 were bulky, expensive bits of kit that just weren't that widely distributed, at least in the British armed forces.
    - Gud 1y ago
      Fair enough. I was there in 2010 and even our FOBs had access to BGANs.
- dheera 1y ago
  It would presumably be more secure to have the recipient receive them directly with a cell phone or satellite device. Printing them creates a literal paper trail and footsteps.
BiteCode_dev 1y ago
French postal service offers this, which is very convenient for legal letters because it stores a copy of it so people can't pretend they received something else.
- Sadzeih 1y ago
  I use this constantly when I have an online document I need to send through the mail. I just use the online postal service to send it directly. It's probably a lot environmentally friendly since they can just print as close as possible to the destination. Instead of sending it across the country etc...
floam 1y ago
There is something like this being used in jails and prisons now. The purpose is to limit the ability of people to sneak in paper bathed in fentanyl or other potent enough substances. Inmates do not receive originals - incoming mail is scanned at some service provider’s office that a PO Box forwards to, and things are reprinted at the detention center and walked to the inmate. Or people sign up for a faster service where photos / letters are uploaded through an app to skip the snail mail + scanning step. One of these is called pigeon.ly At most participating facilities the only exception to get an inmate physical paper from the outside world is legal mail.
- ProllyInfamous 1y ago
  >At most participating facilities the only exception to get an inmate physical paper from the outside world is legal mail. This is how some imprisoned authors have managed to publish their samizdat — by sending thoughts/outlines to their lawyer [under the pretense of legal mail] — when their written ramblings might otherwise have been destroyed [as contraband].
- robobro 1y ago
  > The purpose is to limit the ability of people to sneak in paper bathed in fentanyl Or is it to make even more profit on the backs of prisoners & their families for companies who win juicy contracts from the government? This was being done by private companies before fentanyl. Look into Jpay - they do a lot of slimy things and make a lot of money doing so. The free market in action I guess. https://theappeal.org/prison-tablets-ipads-jpay-securus-gtl/ https://theappeal.org/prison-tablets-ipads-jpay-securus-gtl/
  - floam 1y ago
    With the switch to this paradigm at a certain detention center, the time to get an inmate mail simply addressed to them with an envelope effectively tripled, up from what was already like a week, and if you included any irregular shaped paper or cute stuff it’d get mangled in the process. Ask me how I know. It’s certainly an exploitative service taking advantage of a captive audience. I do think the substances thing is making many more smaller jails consider it.
tantalor 1y ago
We use this for summer camp. The kids aren't allowed anywhere near computers or phones, let alone internet access. So we write them emails and attach photos that are printed out and delivered to their bunks. The service is https://www.bunk1.com/ https://www.bunk1.com/
- hoseyor 1y ago
  Why not simply sit down and write an actual letter with a pen on paper, encouraging your child to also write?
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    Some camps are a week long. You'd only really be able to write on Monday/Tuesday to be sure it got there by Friday.
  - tantalor 1y ago
    The campers are definitely encouraged, and sometimes required, to write letters by hand. In fact their handwriting is much often better than adults, because they write by hand much more frequently.
- vaindil 1y ago
  I'll start by saying I am not a parent. I attended summer camps as a kid and worked at one for years as an older teenager. I love summer camps. Looking back, part of the magic for me was being away from my parents for an extended time in a way that wasn't really possible in any other setting. The service you linked (a way for parents to constantly follow along with what's going on at camp) just feels... wrong? unnecessary? detrimental? to me. Do parents really need to be updated all the time with what's going on while their children are away for a week or two? I don't think it's immoral or unethical to offer this service, I'm sure there's a market for it, but I just don't see why anyone would choose to use it. Let the kids go off to camp and have a good time, and they can tell you about it when they get home. It would really take the wind out of my sails if I got home and my parents already knew everything I had done, instead of getting to tell them all about it myself.
exabrial 1y ago
jfc all we want is the opposite. Think of the massive emissions reduction if we reduced all physical spam to emails. 1. diesel needed to cut the trees down 2. diesel needed haul logs to saw mills 3. natural/gas/coal needed to make the water to turn logs into paper 4. diesel needed to haul paper to printer to make spam 5. diesel needed to haul spam to post office 6. diesel needed to haul spam to to your door 7. diesel needed to put spam in the landfill
miki123211 1y ago
The Polish Post actually introduced a system like this recently. It serves as boring technical infrastructure for government agencies which still need to send physical mail. Instead of each agency employing their own people to handle printing their mail and stuffing it in envelopes, they can just send it electronically to the post office, which will handle it far more efficiently. The eventual goal is to move most people to e-deliveries, which you're encouraged to set up when using government services online. For those who haven't done so, the letter will be printed as close to them as possible to save on delivery time and costs, regardless of where in the country the sending agency is located.
Ancapistani 1y ago
This reminds me of the time FedEx spent $200m trying to integrate fax into their delivery network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapmail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapmail
jdeibele 1y ago
What I wanted (and still want) is a secure place to hold statements from banks for savings accounts, credit cards, etc. and brokerages. I bank with two credit unions. Years ago, they implemented a fee of $2/month for paper statements. I get it, printing and mailing statements costs money. But it also comes to me without me having to log into an account and navigate my way to where the statement is. I'd prefer to have them send the statement each month to an email address I specify. I get that they should take security seriously, so practically maybe that only means Gmail, Apple Mail, etc. are whitelisted. I used to think there was a business idea here, that the banks should be willing to pay $.10/statement to save on the cost of paper. I'd be willing to use the service because the statements would automatically go to it and be retained for forever. The reality is, I'm afraid, that the banks don't want you looking at statements because then you might find errors and dispute them and that costs the banks money.
- ivan888 1y ago
  Yeah I’ve had this same idea for the same reasons, and came to the same conclusions that without legislation, no incentive exists to send statements as attachments in emails or to store them with a 3rd party where they can’t be tampered with when a mistake is discovered
- franga2000 1y ago
  > I get that they should take security seriously, so practically maybe that only means Gmail, Apple Mail, etc. are What does that have to do with security? Geniune question. I really don't see what attach vector this prevents
  - jdeibele 1y ago
    If I were a bank, I would want to send statements containing financial data only to secure places. So that means something like Google, where they have a serious security team protecting accounts and not something like Ed's ISP and Bait Shop. The threat would be from people cracking Ed's and getting the statements there, possibly without the sysadmins at Ed's ever knowing that it had happened.
insane_dreamer 1y ago
I have mixed feelings about the USPS. On the one hand, it seems like a good public service -- and certainly essential when it was created and up until recently. But 99% of what comes in my mail box goes straight in the trash. We do everything we can to stop email spam, why not stop postal spam? If the government offered email as a public service, perhaps there wouldn't need to be any reason for postal mail in terms of ensuring a means of communication that reaches every one. The Postal Service could still exist but would be quite expensive and only used for things that actually matter (i.e., original legal documents like car title, etc.)
anotheruser13 1y ago
This reminds me of the old FedEx Zapmail service they had in the 80s. They didn't get much traction and the service was shut down after 2 years at great expense.

120 points by rfarley04 1y ago

now the junk mail subsidizes USPS. I wonder if they could be profitable without all the credit card preapprovals in the mail.

j_w 1y ago
USPS doesn't technically need to be profitable. It's a service guaranteed by the Government. Government services do not need to turn a profit. Yes, currently the service is expected to fund itself. This is short sighted and has progressively made one of the greatest public services worse.
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  Sure, but then when something goes severely wrong, you wind up thinking of things to better fund USPS. I think USPS doesn't need to be aggressively profitable, but it should at least aim towards being as self-sufficient as reasonably possible. I don't see an issue with this.
  - Goronmon 1y ago
    Sure, but then when something goes severely wrong, you wind up thinking of things to better fund USPS. This logic could be applied to literally anything, so your argument is effectively that the government should never fund anything. If there is a war, cancer/disease research is going to be less important, so the government shouldn't fund cancer/disease research. If suddenly a famine strikes, war is going to be less important, so the government shouldn't fund the military. If a sudden deadly disease arises, funding for food security/research is going to be less important, so the government shouldn't be funding any of that as well.
    - robertlagrant 1y ago
      You're straw-manning their argument to be much more all or nothing than it is. Definitely if there's a total war economy, there's going to be less money for other things, even if that thing is "keeping future inflation in the single digits".
      - potato3732842 1y ago
        Exactly. Nobody expects the welfare office to be self sufficient, what are they gonna do, charge all the recipients? But a mail and parcel service, something that the private sector does profitably, shouldn't be deeply in the red though a little from time to time is probably fine.
        fragmede 1y ago
        On the other hand though, if the private parcel service had to fund 40 years of pensions instead of giving out 401k's, and were obligated to serve unprofitable routes, they'd be deeply in the red. It's not a remotely level playing field, so it's no wonder the government parcel service is having problems.
        potato3732842 1y ago
        I wouldn't consider the USPS to be deeply in the red when compared with other government operations.
        fragmede 1y ago
        deeply in the red is your phrase, not mine
        robertlagrant 1y ago
        > It's not a remotely level playing field What's causing the unlevel playing field?
  - fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
    The downstream benefits of a well functioning USPS could be worth running it at a loss. If efforts to make it profitable make the service worse, then it could be a net negative.
  - jgeada 1y ago
    And the perverse incentive of this direction of thinking is that when you elect people with this thought pattern they prove the point by sabotaging the service. Then they say "see, government is ineffective ", and either directly pocket the resulting money (corruption) or give it to their rich friends (oligarchy).
  - fzzzy 1y ago
    You obviously haven't lived in rural america.
    - dfxm12 1y ago
      On a side note related to your comment, just one side benefit of urbanization would be more efficient delivery of services (including delivery services). Thankfully, the government guarantees it will deliver letters to some remote rural places at a price private companies can't touch, but we can do better to make life easier for everyone: the mail man, the people wanting their mail, etc.
      - fzzzy 1y ago
        I agree that urbanization makes delivery much more efficient. My point was that if USPS goes away, there are many areas of rural america that simply won't be served because it is too expensive.
- orwin 1y ago
  Could USPS offer limited check accounts and debit cards? I've been twice now in WV, in counties so far away from everything, the only government presence is USPS. The only proof you're in the modern US is USPS (and a bit further a weird, small public library near a weirder Dollar tree). Some people have trouble getting their retirement money, other are destitute who found a new, non-homeless life (but have trouble with debt collection or just lost their papers), And from what I've understood, USPS has buildings and employees present everywhere and is really trusted in those deep parts, more than anything the government does. Wouldn't offering basic banking (and maybe limited but free internet access) be a nice addition to help the poorest in the US? Just an idle thought I had for a while
  - moduspol 1y ago
    I'm from WV. I always figured Wal-Mart would pick it up eventually, but I think there may be laws that make that difficult.
    - justin66 1y ago
      I imagine the question is how much money there would be in it for Wal-Mart.
      - jdeibele 1y ago
        A lot of stores in the US used to take payments for utility companies. The idea was that as long as you were there paying that, you'd be tempted to buy things from the store. Paying by check in the mail put a huge dent in this and then having the utility automatically debit your account pretty much put an end to it from what I've seen. I'm sure there are some areas where it still is a thing but they'd also have a high number of people without bank accounts. For a while, utilities would only debit checking accounts, presumably because ACH payments are so much cheaper than credit card ones. A few years, they opened up to credit card payments. There seem to be a lot of people who do everything on credit cards and they must have had to change with the times.
        1y ago
- potato3732842 1y ago
  >Yes, currently the service is expected to fund itself. This is short sighted I could not disagree more. While I agree they don't "need" to be profitable and we "could" just give them tax money the fact that they try to be in the face of competition and come pretty close to doing so despite some dumb requirements really results in an incentive structure that puts them head and shoulders above pretty much any other subsection of government one interacts with. So perhaps let's not remove the incentive for profitability. Edit: And before anyone tries to construe this as me advocating for privatization or anything else like that, I'm saying they're fine the way they are (on a macro level, I'm sure there's tons of individual items that could use refinement, like any organization) and ought to be a model for other government functions. >and has progressively made one of the greatest public services worse. What? Are you joking? Have you ever tried to do anything other than a bog standard transaction at the DMV or get anything beyond typical "homeowner pays professional to do typical thing" type work permitted? The USPS is one of the most user friendly services in existence even once you get off the beaten path of sending standardized envelopes and parcels. If you restrict the comparison to just federal services it's not even close except perhaps some very specific common workflows but even then when it goes off the rails it goes off the rails way harder and is way more painful to resolve. Ask anyone of social security age if you don't believe me.
- kochb 1y ago
  Either it is able to fully fund itself through sender fees and other operations, or the net losses are ultimately paid for by other government revenues, primarily taxes. I enjoy Christmas cards and personal letters as much as anyone, but with electronic payments and telecommunications taking more of the volume, it is increasingly becoming an advertising service. If it is operating unprofitably, we are paying a form of subscription fee to receive those ads.
  - nxobject 1y ago
    More charitably, it's a cost-sharing scheme for last-mile delivery to rural communities and deep suburban sprawl – as, to be fair, is often true for other rural services with significant federal funding like healthcare and higher education.
    - dfxm12 1y ago
      At some point, we should do what we can to promote urbanization. Being able to deliver government services more efficiently is one benefit.
      - jermaustin1 1y ago
        A lot of the people who don't want to live in urban/suburban areas also view "government services" as a bad thing to begin with. Probably because they've never had good access to services.
        dfxm12 1y ago
        I think they view government services as a bad thing for a few reasons, despite having access to good government services. These two stick out to me: The ubiquitous conservative media bombards them with lies about the quality, quantity and cost of these services, along with who receives the benefits. They also haven't taken a step back to consider all the things they enjoy that are provided as government services, like roads, police, education, subsidized mail delivery, unemployment, support for dairy products, etc.
- TheJoeMan 1y ago
  This creates a market discontinuity by the government that leads to abuse. Part of the reason for Amazon's dominance is that USPS undercharges for package delivery. When Amazon rolled out their own delivery service, they optimize delivering the "cheap" packages, and making USPS deliver the "expensive" out of the way packages, and due to flat-rates, USPS was in the red. USPS's solution? Keep squeezing grandma who wants to mail a few first-class letters a year.
  - BenjiWiebe 1y ago
    Maybe in some places, but in our rural area (Durham, Kansas) 95%+ of Amazon packages are delivered by UPS.
- kbolino 1y ago
  It actually was profitable for most of its existence. It zealously guarded its monopoly on first-class mail because that's where the money came from. And it did so before it was spun out as a quasi-private entity. This is actually one of the challenges of public services in the US today; many things, from mail delivery to bus and train service to road construction and vehicle registration, were once self-sufficient but haven't been for a long time. There's a lot of reasons for this, but one of the outcomes is that entities which used to take care of themselves now have to beg for a growing portion out of the general fund. However, it's clear that the 1970s experiment to have it turn a profit again didn't work and likely never would have worked (it was, in many ways, set up for failure).
  - jermaustin1 1y ago
    For the USPS, it would be profitable if it wasn't required to self-fund and pre-fund all retirement benefits for current and future employees 75 years in advance, paying for retirement health care for "workers" who aren't in the workforce, or even born yet. It was a political ploy to force the USPS into debt in 2006 with the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act. No other federal agency or private sector business pre-funds its retirement benefits.
    - kbolino 1y ago
      That requirement was repealed in 2022. The USPS still isn't profitable. While it reaped the benefit of that repeal and reported only a small loss in 2022, it reported much larger losses in 2023 and 2024, comparable to its loss in 2021 (when the requirement was still in effect).
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - strongpigeon 1y ago
        Last quarter was slightly profitable [0], but yeah the losses in 2023 were pretty big. https://about.usps.com/what/financials/financial-conditions-results-reports/fy2025-q1.pdf https://about.usps.com/what/financials/financial-conditions-...
kotaKat 1y ago
To be fair, all the credit card preapprovals in the mail help ensure every last American is reached by mail, even if it means by mule train. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/06/mule-mail-delivery-supai-arizona/682619/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/06/mule-ma... https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/06/mule-mail-delivery-supai-arizona/682619/ https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.theatla...

nashashmi 1y ago

[flagged]

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
malfist 1y ago
Who are you to decide how I get my mail?
- dust42 1y ago
  You do yourself. This service exists in Germany and likely in many other countries since a quarter of a century. Cost: 15€/month. The paper letters are collected and once per month forwarded to you. [1] https://www.deutschepost.de/en/p/postscan.html https://www.deutschepost.de/en/p/postscan.html (english version)
  - bobmcnamara 1y ago
    Literally paying the government to read your mail :)
    - inkspotch 1y ago
      Too late.
  - soco 1y ago
    It was 10CHF/month in Switzerland, I activated it during longer vacations only.
  - malfist 1y ago
    OP did not phrase it as optional.
    - nashashmi 1y ago
      Correction: I did say “for a service fee”. You can’t force change on transferring from a medium to another medium en masse, particularly when the service needs info for opt in.

oldpersonintx 1y ago

[dead]

citizenfishy 1y ago

I developed so many similar services for the UK Royal Mail in the 1990's We used Yellow Royal Mail branded envelopes to gain attention.

maguay 1y ago
Would love to hear more about your experience! Any chance you'd be up for an interview on the Buttondown blog?
- citizenfishy 1y ago
  Happy to, find me on LinkedIN - Dave Barter CEO Nautoguide

dmix 1y ago

> The Postal Rate Commission took 15 months to review E-COM—long enough that standard postage went up 5¢ in the interim. It barred the USPS from operating its own electronic networks, just in case the Post Office decided to deliver messages electronically and in print. And it raised the price on the service to 26¢ for the first page, plus 5¢ for a second page. > Sending the messages wouldn’t be simple, either. Customers had to register their company with the USPS using Form 5320, pay a $50 annual fee, send a minimum of 200 messages per post office, and “prepay postage for transmitted messages received, processed, and printed for each transmission,” dictated the 1981 Federal Register. Almost sounds like a parody

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago

So that people can discuss the US Postal service intelligently. About 15 years ago, there was a service (Outbox) designed to scan your mail, email anything important to you, and discard junk mail. They were growing, people enjoyed the service, and then they went to Washington DC to talk to the Postmaster General about expanding nationwide. https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/outbox-vs-usps-how-the-post-office-killed-digital-mail/ https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/outbox-vs-usps-how-the-po... >When Evan and Will got called in to meet with the postmaster general, they were joined by the USPS’ general counsel and chief of digital strategy. But instead, Evan recounts that Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe “looked at us” and said “we have a misunderstanding. ‘You disrupt my service and we will never work with you.'” Further, “You mentioned making the service better for our customers; but the American citizens aren’t our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our customers. Your service hurts our ability to serve those customers.'” That's the US mail. Can we all please stop pretending that any actual human needs the US mail to continue? No one's paying their bills through the mail... you can't even really write checks. Hell, given how international mail works, it's the US government subsidizing Aliexpress and Temu. No one should be defending the US Postal Service.

chneu 1y ago
The USPS does a lot more than ship junk mail. It's a fun joke but it's super ignorant. It speaks to idiots, everyone else rolls their eyes and thinks you're not very bright. It's a public service. It doesn't need to turn a profit because every dollar put into it generates economic activity.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  >The USPS does a lot more than ship junk mail. It's a fun joke but Junk mail is well over 99% of their activity by any metric you can offer. Pieces of mail, revenue, weight, etc. It's not a joke. It's the fucking truth of it. And you're all bizarrely delusional if you can't or won't see it. >everyone else rolls their eyes and thinks you're not very bright. I've experienced that all my life. And yet I always out-tested everyone who thought that. Why would that change? The comment above yours talks about how he's always paying by check... what the fuck is grandpa going to do in the next couple years when that goes away? They can only postpone the deprecation of paper bank checks for so long. Guess he will either have to stop living in the 1950s, or just croak. >It's a public service. It's a goddamned public nuisance. >It doesn't need to turn a profit because every dollar put into it generates economic activity. ??? We could also pay them to dig holes and fill them back in. That'd be an economic win too, eh? Though your comment probably comes closest to hinting at the real justification: a unionized voting bloc that without it the Democrats would become doomed to irrelevance.

jdietrich 1y ago

This kind of service does have at least one very valuable niche application - armed forces personnel on active deployment. During the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, British troops received hundreds of thousands of letters every month through the e-bluey service. Letters could be sent via email (including attachments) and were printed as close as possible to the recipient. It greatly reduced logistics costs and improved speed of delivery, often facilitating next-day delivery to extremely remote Forward Operating Bases. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Forces_Post_Office#The_%22e-Bluey%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Forces_Post_Office#The... It isn't an entirely novel idea - during the Second World War, mail was often sent to very remote destinations on microfilm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-mail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-mail

Gud 1y ago
Why didn’t the service personnel have access to their e-mail? I was in Afghanistan for a different country. It was my job to keep the satellite communications working, including so people could send emails to their friends and family.
- jdietrich 1y ago
  >Why didn’t the service personnel have access to their e-mail? Because they weren't in one of the larger bases that had satellite internet. Combat troops in the wilds of Helmand might go weeks without seeing a fresh egg or a slice of bread. Satellite terminals circa 2002 were bulky, expensive bits of kit that just weren't that widely distributed, at least in the British armed forces.
  - Gud 1y ago
    Fair enough. I was there in 2010 and even our FOBs had access to BGANs.
dheera 1y ago
It would presumably be more secure to have the recipient receive them directly with a cell phone or satellite device. Printing them creates a literal paper trail and footsteps.

BiteCode_dev 1y ago

French postal service offers this, which is very convenient for legal letters because it stores a copy of it so people can't pretend they received something else.

Sadzeih 1y ago
I use this constantly when I have an online document I need to send through the mail. I just use the online postal service to send it directly. It's probably a lot environmentally friendly since they can just print as close as possible to the destination. Instead of sending it across the country etc...

floam 1y ago

There is something like this being used in jails and prisons now. The purpose is to limit the ability of people to sneak in paper bathed in fentanyl or other potent enough substances. Inmates do not receive originals - incoming mail is scanned at some service provider’s office that a PO Box forwards to, and things are reprinted at the detention center and walked to the inmate. Or people sign up for a faster service where photos / letters are uploaded through an app to skip the snail mail + scanning step. One of these is called pigeon.ly At most participating facilities the only exception to get an inmate physical paper from the outside world is legal mail.

ProllyInfamous 1y ago
>At most participating facilities the only exception to get an inmate physical paper from the outside world is legal mail. This is how some imprisoned authors have managed to publish their samizdat — by sending thoughts/outlines to their lawyer [under the pretense of legal mail] — when their written ramblings might otherwise have been destroyed [as contraband].
robobro 1y ago
> The purpose is to limit the ability of people to sneak in paper bathed in fentanyl Or is it to make even more profit on the backs of prisoners & their families for companies who win juicy contracts from the government? This was being done by private companies before fentanyl. Look into Jpay - they do a lot of slimy things and make a lot of money doing so. The free market in action I guess. https://theappeal.org/prison-tablets-ipads-jpay-securus-gtl/ https://theappeal.org/prison-tablets-ipads-jpay-securus-gtl/
- floam 1y ago
  With the switch to this paradigm at a certain detention center, the time to get an inmate mail simply addressed to them with an envelope effectively tripled, up from what was already like a week, and if you included any irregular shaped paper or cute stuff it’d get mangled in the process. Ask me how I know. It’s certainly an exploitative service taking advantage of a captive audience. I do think the substances thing is making many more smaller jails consider it.

tantalor 1y ago

We use this for summer camp. The kids aren't allowed anywhere near computers or phones, let alone internet access. So we write them emails and attach photos that are printed out and delivered to their bunks. The service is https://www.bunk1.com/ https://www.bunk1.com/

hoseyor 1y ago
Why not simply sit down and write an actual letter with a pen on paper, encouraging your child to also write?
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  Some camps are a week long. You'd only really be able to write on Monday/Tuesday to be sure it got there by Friday.
- tantalor 1y ago
  The campers are definitely encouraged, and sometimes required, to write letters by hand. In fact their handwriting is much often better than adults, because they write by hand much more frequently.
vaindil 1y ago
I'll start by saying I am not a parent. I attended summer camps as a kid and worked at one for years as an older teenager. I love summer camps. Looking back, part of the magic for me was being away from my parents for an extended time in a way that wasn't really possible in any other setting. The service you linked (a way for parents to constantly follow along with what's going on at camp) just feels... wrong? unnecessary? detrimental? to me. Do parents really need to be updated all the time with what's going on while their children are away for a week or two? I don't think it's immoral or unethical to offer this service, I'm sure there's a market for it, but I just don't see why anyone would choose to use it. Let the kids go off to camp and have a good time, and they can tell you about it when they get home. It would really take the wind out of my sails if I got home and my parents already knew everything I had done, instead of getting to tell them all about it myself.

exabrial 1y ago

jfc all we want is the opposite. Think of the massive emissions reduction if we reduced all physical spam to emails. 1. diesel needed to cut the trees down 2. diesel needed haul logs to saw mills 3. natural/gas/coal needed to make the water to turn logs into paper 4. diesel needed to haul paper to printer to make spam 5. diesel needed to haul spam to post office 6. diesel needed to haul spam to to your door 7. diesel needed to put spam in the landfill

miki123211 1y ago

The Polish Post actually introduced a system like this recently. It serves as boring technical infrastructure for government agencies which still need to send physical mail. Instead of each agency employing their own people to handle printing their mail and stuffing it in envelopes, they can just send it electronically to the post office, which will handle it far more efficiently. The eventual goal is to move most people to e-deliveries, which you're encouraged to set up when using government services online. For those who haven't done so, the letter will be printed as close to them as possible to save on delivery time and costs, regardless of where in the country the sending agency is located.

Ancapistani 1y ago

This reminds me of the time FedEx spent $200m trying to integrate fax into their delivery network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapmail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapmail

jdeibele 1y ago

What I wanted (and still want) is a secure place to hold statements from banks for savings accounts, credit cards, etc. and brokerages. I bank with two credit unions. Years ago, they implemented a fee of $2/month for paper statements. I get it, printing and mailing statements costs money. But it also comes to me without me having to log into an account and navigate my way to where the statement is. I'd prefer to have them send the statement each month to an email address I specify. I get that they should take security seriously, so practically maybe that only means Gmail, Apple Mail, etc. are whitelisted. I used to think there was a business idea here, that the banks should be willing to pay $.10/statement to save on the cost of paper. I'd be willing to use the service because the statements would automatically go to it and be retained for forever. The reality is, I'm afraid, that the banks don't want you looking at statements because then you might find errors and dispute them and that costs the banks money.

ivan888 1y ago
Yeah I’ve had this same idea for the same reasons, and came to the same conclusions that without legislation, no incentive exists to send statements as attachments in emails or to store them with a 3rd party where they can’t be tampered with when a mistake is discovered
franga2000 1y ago
> I get that they should take security seriously, so practically maybe that only means Gmail, Apple Mail, etc. are What does that have to do with security? Geniune question. I really don't see what attach vector this prevents
- jdeibele 1y ago
  If I were a bank, I would want to send statements containing financial data only to secure places. So that means something like Google, where they have a serious security team protecting accounts and not something like Ed's ISP and Bait Shop. The threat would be from people cracking Ed's and getting the statements there, possibly without the sysadmins at Ed's ever knowing that it had happened.

insane_dreamer 1y ago

I have mixed feelings about the USPS. On the one hand, it seems like a good public service -- and certainly essential when it was created and up until recently. But 99% of what comes in my mail box goes straight in the trash. We do everything we can to stop email spam, why not stop postal spam? If the government offered email as a public service, perhaps there wouldn't need to be any reason for postal mail in terms of ensuring a means of communication that reaches every one. The Postal Service could still exist but would be quite expensive and only used for things that actually matter (i.e., original legal documents like car title, etc.)

anotheruser13 1y ago

This reminds me of the old FedEx Zapmail service they had in the 80s. They didn't get much traction and the service was shut down after 2 years at great expense.