from Hacker News

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

by rfarley04 on 5/14/25, 11:59 AM with 125 comments

• by jdietrich on 5/14/25, 2:26 PM

  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...

  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

• by floam on 5/14/25, 4:53 PM

  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.

• by citizenfishy on 5/14/25, 1:29 PM

  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.

• by jdeibele on 5/14/25, 10:22 PM

  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.

• by BiteCode_dev on 5/14/25, 3:48 PM

  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.

• by tantalor on 5/14/25, 5:45 PM

  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/

• by miki123211 on 5/14/25, 8:42 PM

  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.

• by insane_dreamer on 5/15/25, 12:30 AM

  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.)

• by Ancapistani on 5/14/25, 10:15 PM

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

• by anotheruser13 on 5/15/25, 5:54 PM

  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.

• by exabrial on 5/14/25, 7:32 PM

  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

• by dmix on 5/14/25, 2:14 PM

  > 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

• by calvinmorrison on 5/14/25, 12:36 PM

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

• by NoMoreNicksLeft on 5/14/25, 2:16 PM

  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-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.