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

USPS Finances, Profitability, and Policy

• Debate over whether USPS should be self-funding vs treated as a taxpayer-supported public service.
• Some argue the current “must pay for itself” model is shortsighted and degrades service; others say profit pressure creates better incentives and USPS is already one of the best-functioning government services.
• Several comments highlight structural handicaps: mandated unprofitable routes, pension/retiree prefunding (partly repealed in 2022 but debt and liabilities remain), and congressional constraints on new lines of business.
• Others note USPS historically was profitable on first-class mail, but volume shifts and policy changes pushed it into recurring losses.
• Comparison with private carriers: USPS is vastly cheaper for letters, often cheaper and more reliable for parcels, but experiences with UPS/FedEx vary widely.

Public Service vs “Junk Mail Machine”

• Strong split: one side sees USPS as essential infrastructure (rural delivery, prescriptions, legal docs, passports, last-mile coverage); another claims “almost all” volume is junk mail and that the system mainly serves advertisers.
• Story of a startup that digitized and filtered mail allegedly being shut down by USPS leadership, who reportedly said junk-mailers are their real “customers,” is used as evidence USPS protects spam.
• Counterarguments stress broad economic benefits of universal cheap delivery and warn against dismantling a deeply integrated public utility for ideological reasons.

New Roles: Postal Banking and Digital/Hybrid Services

• Multiple calls for resurrecting postal banking to serve rural/poor communities, compete with card networks, and leverage the trusted nationwide USPS footprint. Historical US and international precedents are noted.
• Related idea: USPS-run basic email / document or statement repository to replace paper, though commenters think banks have little incentive to adopt something that makes error-disputes easier.

Digital-to-Physical Mail Analogues

• Many examples of E-COM–like systems:
  • Military “e-bluey” and WWII microfilm mail to deployed troops.
  • Prison mail scanning services (with debate over whether this is about safety vs profit and exploitation).
  • French and Polish postal systems that accept digital input, print near the recipient, and treat stored copies as legal proof.
  • Camp services where parents email messages that are printed for kids, raising questions about over-monitoring vs “let camp be camp.”
  • Historical and failed commercial attempts: FedEx Zapmail, UK Royal Mail experiments.

Spam, Environment, and Urbanization

• Some participants want the opposite of paper output: migrate all spam to email to reduce emissions across the entire paper and logistics chain.
• Others suggest long-term policy should favor urbanization to make services like mail more efficient, but note cultural and political resistance (including conspiracy-laden backlash to planning concepts).