

1981: U.S. Postal Service announces E-COM email - mikecane
http://stampsjoann.net/E-COM/E-Com-Mail.html

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patio11
There is still a USPS product today which does this net-to-junk mail gateway.
It is a usability cluster flop, but the core value prop is good: why print 10
million pieces of mail in California to deliver to St. Louis when you can have
a computer in St. Louis do the mail merge and save literally a ton of freight?

I used the customer-facing version to send letters to banks when cleaning up
credit issues. (For a variety of reasons, paper works better for this.) It
actually worked out to being more expensive to have the Post Office print and
deliver 20 PDFs than to do it myself and airmail them 6,000 miles each, but it
saved me a trip to the post office.

~~~
hammock
_the core vale prop is good: why print 10 million pieces of mail in Calif. to
deliver to St. Louis when you can have a computer in St. Louis do the mail
merge and save literally a ton of freight?_

At first glance it may make sense to have mail originate from twenty
proximate, regional post offices, rather than one point in California. There
are scale issues here though, and believe me, nowhere but the print shop are
your costs so affected by scale - it is the #1 factor by a long shot. Printing
10 million pieces in one place then mailing around the country, surprisingly,
is very often cheaper than printing 500,000 pieces in 20 places despite not
having to mail the stuff as far.

~~~
culturestate
This is exactly correct, assuming you're printing offset rather than digitally
(e.g. on an Indigo.) Offset printing has tremendous economies of scale, making
it FAR cheaper in most cases to print once and drop ship to various SCFs than
to print multiple times.

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Lexarius
I recall at one point that AOL would do this - I guess enough clueless people
tried putting a mailing address into the "To" box that they decided to just go
with it instead of dealing with one more class of bizarre support call.

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tommi
Cached: <http://stampsjoann.net.nyud.net/E-COM/E-Com-Mail.html>

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josephmosby
I also seem to remember seeing the Automated Postal Center machines (the
vending machines for stamps and scales and things) in post offices long before
I saw automated cashiers in grocery stores everywhere. There's a lot of things
going against USPS right now, but finding extremely usable technology that's
casually ahead of its time doesn't seem to be one of them.

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ck2
Ha, is that a VT100 terminal?

With all the women shown in mainframe/miniframe ads, you think more women
would have gone into programming back then. However I guess there aren't too
many women in autorepair today despite all the car tool calendars, ahem.

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Mithrandir
Cached (other cache is down too):
[http://web.archive.org/web/20080905140834/http://stampsjoann...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080905140834/http://stampsjoann.net/E-COM/E-Com-
Mail.html)

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aneth
A reminder that we should be thankful for the academic orgins of the winning
Internet standards. We could live in a world of fragmented protocols and pay
walls at every turn. Instead we live in a world where the hacker standard
prevails - that everything should be free unless it is truly a unique value
add.

Imagine if Linux or BSD had been positioned such that they won the consumer OS
war. Now imagine if AOL won the war for consumer Internet standards. Some may
argue, but I believe this could have happened had TCP/IP and HTML not landed
full force with as such an open, powerful, and stable alternative - largely
due to years of academic and scientific influence.

AOL failed to adopt the way Microsoft did, and the open Internet was already
compelling as a consumer experience, so they would have had a more difficult
time competing - but it might have happened.

Had the same occurred for consumer OS, we could live in a different world of
open desktop standards. We appear to be headed that way 30 years later through
the browser, but it's going to take at least another 5 or 10 years to supplant
proprietary desktop OSes.

We do have a similar battle going on for the mobile platform. I'm an avid
Apple user and fan, but I'm rooting ultimately for HTML5 as the standard for
developing apps. Let's just hope it's good enough to compete.

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coldarchon
Back in Germany: <http://www.epost.de/>

absolutely no spam, free fax, free and secure mail, free sms when you get a
letter, no letter will ever get lost, perfect authentification, perfect
encryption, any email can become a registered mail; including pdf files or for
businesses even DVD and CD-ROM, perfect for e-government &banks, backup for
all documents and if you are blind services are for free. The catch? You need
a mobile phone, because if you change password, your profile or anything like
that you are sent a TAN. If you log in you are told when you logged in the
last time including your IP.

