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If the USPS wants more usage, rather than marketing, they need to "innovate" just a tad. There is a value-add service that I really wish the USPS would provide. It is very simple too...

I would like an abstraction layer for my address. I am still fairly young and move semi-frequently -- every few years. I want a static address that I can give to my bank, DMV, anything that needs to mail me things. This address will auto-forward to my current living address. Thus I will not have to update all my services when I move. It might also be nice to have multiple addresses forwarded to the same location as well; my address and my current roommates.

The format of this address could follow PO box style, or they could even invent something new (blah@physical.usps.com).

This is something that I think would be easy for the USPS to provide (mail is routed electronically, and I am basically just asking for a lookup table). This would be more difficult for "competitors" UPS/FedEx/DHL to provide, and just might bring more use to the USPS. So why hasn't the USPS done it?

Absolutely! I could have kept adding more and more too. But yes, this is a perfect one that they could turn on and I bet everyone would pay something per year to get a virtual address. And what's great is that it's a virtual address that the government knows about. So they can still serve me papers and collect taxes and all that government stuff. But I don't have to worry about some guy coming over to my house because I pissed him accidentally on Yelp and he found my address from some email footer I sent.
Man, I've been searching for this (but I live in Europe, so across country borders, there is no hope unfortunately).

Instead what USPS could do is actually scan all this stuff and email me a PDF. 80% of the snail mail I receive I don't need to have physically anyways. For those pieces that need physical delivery -> check a checkbox and USPS could send it to my current address. (Notice how that also solves the addressing indirection?)

Hey, while we're on USPS feature requests, this one is a bit overdue: SPAM FILTERING.

Allow me to blacklist certain senders, that's all.

Good idea. Also, I'd like to be able to send electronic documents via the mail and for the USPS to introduce a legally acceptable signature they can put on the document. That way I can do all of my legal stuff easily through the mail or send that letter to grandma who's off the grid.
Earth Class Mail does this, but I agree, it would be really nice if that was a standard option.
This is something that is very close to my family so I have a bit of experience with how the Postal Service is going.

The big sell of the postal service is that it costs the same amount to send a letter from San Francisco to Los Angeles as it does to send a letter from the bayou in Louisiana to Honolulu, Hawaii. In this, physical mail is the big equalizer.

The USPS is also required to deliver mail to even the most remote of places because if the mail system did not work for everyone then several things would start to break: collecting taxes or votes or anything that a normal citizen should require can be done through mail, at minimum.

Really, the only way to replace mail is to provide the same level of reliability and free-to-receive service for another communication medium such as telephone or internet.

I think you're missing the OP's point. He isn't suggesting ending postal service, but coming up with new and better services instead of trying to scare people away from email.

For many people, the post office is just an incredibly slow, junk mail delivery system. If you care about the USPS, I'm surprised you don't agree with the OP that new ideas are needed.

(One idea i'd like to see is a registered email service, so you know an email was received. The post office has the public's trust to pull this off.)

> The big sell of the postal service is that it costs the same amount to send a letter from San Francisco to Los Angeles as it does to send a letter from the bayou in Louisiana to Honolulu, Hawaii. In this, physical mail is the big equalizer.

That's also true of the internet. It doesn't cost anything to email someone who's right next to you or who is across the globe. There is very little demand for mail these days and that's pretty obvious from watching the linked USPS advertisement.

>The big sell of the postal service is that it costs the same amount to send a letter from San Francisco to Los Angeles as it does to send a letter from the bayou in Louisiana to Honolulu, Hawaii.

That's not a big sell if you're sending a letter from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I don't see any reason for rates not to reflect costs - why am I subsidizing other people every time I send a letter?

Right, I wasn't saying anything at all about replacing mail. I was saying quite the opposite. How can the USPS succeed at getting more mail sent? And I pointed out a bunch of examples of people improving mail and using mail to send tons of awesome things. If those businesses improve, the USPS will improve.
Nearly all my mail ends up at addresses from my past. If it wasn't for e-bills, I would never receive (my own) bills. And I have received mountains of mail from countless former tenants at every place I've lived, mail they will never see. The post doesn't seem very reliable to me.
The big sell of the postal service is that it costs the same amount to send a letter from San Francisco to Los Angeles as it does to send a letter from the bayou in Louisiana to Honolulu, Hawaii. In this, physical mail is the big equalizer.

No. They charge the same amount to send those two letters. It does not cost the same amount, however. Regular physical mail delivery at current prices is unsustainable. Period.

Mail theft exists. In fact it's one of the leading causes of identity theft.

And computer viruses? Any one ever been delivered anthrax through email?

Also, I see way more junk mail in my mail box than I do in my email inbox ...
And a paper archive was never lost in a fire or flood.
On the other hand, my email provider has never decided to just throw away my mail because it was too lazy to work its entire shift.

Which absolutely does not characterize the majority of postal workers, but it's happened enough to make the news.

There's no structural reason for any email employee to cause my email to not be delivered, but there is that structural possibility for a demotivated postal worker.

Or something from Ted Kaczynski?
This is a perfect example of why the USPS is on its way out.

People haven't forgotten about the USPS. They simply naturally no longer have a need for it. We often check our mail once a week!

Why? Because we don't get anything useful in the mail. Just junk mail. Once a week, we think "Have we checked the mail this week? Hmm, better go check it."

No amount of advertising by the USPS is going to save them. They're not going to magically become useful again because they have TV commercials.

It's over.

To be fair: the USPS is being rushed out the door via a legislative hit job. They've been required to accumulate a reserve of 75 years-worth of worker benefits (retirement and healthcare) -- something I don't believe any other company or government service has to do -- and build up that reserve in 10 years, on their existing budget.

So the speed of their decline is greatly exaggerated by this and not entirely reflective of the drop in utilization.

Personally, I see no reason the USPS couldn't remain and remain as a useful service if they transitioned to being better at sending/tracking packages as opposed to letters.

UPS and FedEx are great and all, but they've nowhere near the customer focus that the USPS has. And in many cases companies offering shipping services already leverage the USPS to deliver useful mail and packages -- it's a great service for them, because they can get the attention that the average citizen cannot. I think there's plenty of room to expand on what works for the USPS, maintaining a useful baseline service for Americans.

All that said: yes, their marketing has been atrocious, embarrassing, unhelpful and utterly unnecessary lately.

It shows how hostile a dying industry becomes. Looks to me like the RIAA and USPS are in similar situations by the way they're acting.
I live in a small town and recently made a trip to the big city..

I was absolutely amazed at how many advertising campaigns are based on fear. I had completely forgotten about LifeLock, Life Insurance, Home Security Systems, Health Insurance, Car Alarms ... etc. etc.

Seeing ads that say "Buy this or else..." completely shocked me.

It appears to be quite the norm these days.

> Seeing ads that say "Buy this or else..." completely shocked me.

Why? Those products only exist because bad things can happen. Of course their advertising campaigns are going to remind you that bad things can happen.

USPS's business model has nothing to do with safety or security and thus it is shocking to see them using fear to sell their product.

Playing on your emotions is an important part of marketing. Most successful marketing campaigns to this to some degree.
I'm going to be honest here for a moment. I agreed with everything you said, but the disorganized, grammatically-incorrect manner in which you delivered it made it harder to read and understand. Slang writing doesn't get a point across as well as a well-structured, creative sentence with a vibrant vocabulary.
It's a federal offense to steal someone's mail out of their mailbox. No such protections exist for email.
Title 18 U.S.C Section 1030 (the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) makes it a federal offense to exceed your authorized access on, basically, any computer system anywhere. (Does it communicate? It is used in interstate commerce? BAM.)
I think you'll find that it is a federal offense in your country to hack someones email.
This is an excellent point! As "technologists" I think we believe that a meritocracy of technological prowess should decide who survives, but that view threatens to really short sell the social ramifications of such moves.

We replaced phones with the internet, but in doing so lost common-carrier protections because we were paying attention to the technology not the law. If we replace mail with email and don't retain the same legally protected status on private communications, we'll have only ourselves to blame.

A refrigerator has never been hacked, but the USPS still can't manage to put my mail into my labeled mailbox instead of my neighbor's.
Is the author equating email with Google or am I missing something?
Yeah, the addition of Google in the title feels like link bait, although the author may not have intended it that way. It would have been more honest with email in place of Google.

Honestly, stuffing letters into file cabinets makes me cringe. I just think of the impending annoyance of having to sort through the pile of useless information that I'll feel the compulsion to shred while I do it.

USPS blew it. They could have evolved/adapted into different businesses. Not only could they have competed with UPS and FedEX for parcel delivery at scale, but there was (and perhaps still is) an opportunity for an entity to provide 3rd party authenticated email service-- and charge for it.

Instead, they got comfortable with merely existing as a junk-mail conduit. Pathetic.

Sadly, in the current environment, where the failure of government programs is taken to be virtually axiomatic, the USPS is running out of slack to re-invent itself.

The main problem the USPS has right now is that Congress a few years back mandated that they put aside money for pensions of USPS employees who haven't even been born yet, let alone hired. FedEx and UPS don't have that requirement.
Much of the quasi-independent USPS's attempt to move in a UPS/FedEx-ish direction was blocked by the government. They actually tried to get to the most profitable segment of the market, fast package delivery between major metropolitan areas, before FedEx or UPS did much in that area, but their 1978 proposal for an "Express Mail Metro" service was blocked by the Postal Regulatory Commission.
The USPS ad isn't completely baseless. We just recently did a virus cleanup for someone who opened up what they thought was a ticket confirmation for their boss in their email. Oops. (Their mail service provider apparently doesn't block zip files containing executables.)

There is a lot of confusion out there from people who aren't sure what is and isn't safe to open. The knowledge that we take for granted -- .jpg is safe, .vbs is not -- is completely alien to most computer users.

And then there are the scams. And yeah, people still fall for those, too: "But it said it came from my friend! I just thought they had gone on a vacation in France!"

We often get calls from people along the lines of, "I just received this message [..], is it safe to click on it?"

So in the real world, the marketing behind this ad is pretty sound.

On the other hand, we get deliveries all the time and USPS is by far our least favorite. Roughly half of items shipped by USPS are misdelivered at least once before they finally make it to us, if they arrive at all.

> The knowledge that we take for granted -- .jpg is safe, .vbs is not

Not always: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms04-02...

I receive bunch of scam letters in to my mailbox. One looked like official gov printed notification and started with words "You might be subject for 5 years in prison" and then smaller letters "if you prevent delivering this mail". And then actual ads - extend warranty of your car..

Same goes about "won tickets to cruise" with phone number where they offer you to buy something...

So in this regard USPS is not better then email. It is just happened that sending bio hazardous stuff is expensive through snail mail..

Okay, I agree with the OP that the Postal Service is acting ridiculous. I've had to reassure elderly people that just because Facebook offered them a too-good-to-be-true offer that turned out to be a virus once, that that doesn't make it much more dangerous than a telephone. Thousands of elderly people are scammed on telephones every year and quietly lose millions of dollars rather than simply catch a botnet virus.

Unfortunately for USPS, negative political advertising is all about getting the other side to stay home and not participate. The other side is already sold on technology and won't listen.

With that said, the OP's zealous belief that owning a Mac and a firewall makes him immune is comical at best.

"Mail is so awesome now more than any time ever because it’s so much less full of junk than my email."

Maybe it's just because I am almost entirely switched to e-bills, but my experience is totally the opposite. I rarely get spam messages in my gmail account (once a month?) but my email every day is 90%+ commercial bulk mail. Maybe once a week I get a personal letter or other item specifically sent to me. The rest is either catalogs, credit card offers or financial disclosure / privacy disclosure letters from my credit cards or brokerage.

While this article has some good points, I feel it's advice on how to advertise is misguided. Why does a government mandated monopoly waste money advertising?

Every time USPS asks for a rate increase I can't help but wonder how much they spent on Lance Armstrong or the other advertising campaigns.

Make your service efficient and reliable, that's your job. You haven't been glamorous since the pony express days (I know thats a myth).

I want my mail to be reliably delivered at a good price. I don't want you to be slick or hip.

Why are government services spending time and money with advertising at all. They exist to provide a service to citizens if citizens want it. We're both shareholders and customers. They certainly don't exist to ensure their ongoing existence.

This isn't a PSA for the greater good of the country, this is full blown advertising and it should never happen with tax payer dollars. ever.

This blows my mind.

FTA> Can the government acquire private companies? I imagine you could. Take your commercial money you are blowing on this crap, and start acquiring companies doing innovative things with mail.

AHAHAHAHAHA. No. It would take a lot to drive me away from Google, but this would definitely be the fastest.

It's not good for the environment. Why kill more trees with junk mail?
After being reminded of the "You wouldn't download a car" meme yesterday, I could completely see this becoming the next one.
This ad is very misguided. Is there really no other reason to use mail? If not, then well ... it should go away lol.

I mean honestly ... mail doesn't get hacked? It is a felony to steal other people's mail, or open the envelope and replace it with something else. I can use social engineering at so many levels to replace a letter to someone, or make it go missing, I mean seriously? Come on. Distract the postman as your accomplish slips a letter in...

I'd like to disagree with the USPS that a paper letter has never been infected with a virus. Remember the anthrax and uni-bomber eras?