E-COM: The time the USPS spent $40M subsidizing junk (e)mail

Summary

Email, for just under three years, came in a blue-and-white envelope from the United States Postal Service.Every new technology, it seemed—telegrams, telephones, faxes, and faster delivery services alike—had threatened the Postal Service’s monopoly on delivering the mail. This time, the threat seemed existential. A 1982 Congressional report predicted that “Two-thirds or more of the mailstream could be handled electronically,” and “the volume of mail is likely to peak in the next 10 years.”Good thing the mailmen were ready. The Post Office had landed on a plan to co-opt the email revolution.How do you get email to the folks without computers? What if the Post Office printed out email, stamped it, dropped it in folks’ mailboxes along with the rest of their mail, and saved the USPS once and for all?And so in 1982 E-COM was born—and, inadvertently, helped coin the term “e-mail.”Mail on the wireThe original study that recommended the USPS start sending email, for everyone.It all started in 1971, when the Post Office Department was rebranded for the first time in its 179-year history and turned into the United States Postal Service. Through snow, rain, sleet, and gloom, they got nearly 87 billion pieces of mail through that year.It’d weathered the elements, and now it needed to weather sweeping technological changes. So among the newly christened USPS’s first acts was to open an Advanced Service department and hire ex-Peace Corps analyst Gene Johnson to run it and decide how mail of the future should look.The Postal Service had long adapted by embracing the new. Jeeps in lieu of horses, Zone Improvement Plan (or ZIP, as we’d come to know them) codes to automate mail sorting. The USPS couldn’t beat telegrams for speed, so they embraced them with a Western Union partnership to send “Mailgrams” next-day through the mail for $2.75 (a moderate success, that—incredibly—ran until Western Union terminated telegram service in 2006).The next frontier to conquer: Electronic mail.“Th...