By the end of the twentieth century, humanity had finally figured out how to send written communications across the planet almost instantaneously, without paper, envelopes, postage stamps, or the assistance of a horse.

It was called email, and it was revolutionary. You could send a message at nearly the speed of light, and you didn’t have to buy a stamp. It was quick, inexpensive, and, depending on where your computer was located, you didn’t even have to put on pants to send and receive your correspondence.

(A quick clarification for our British readers: Americans use “pants” to mean “trousers,” rather than “underwear.” Admittedly, both interpretations work equally well here, but we’re trying not to make this any weirder than we already did.)

Naturally, the United States Postal Service took one look at this technological miracle and wondered whether there was some way to make it slower, more expensive, and considerably more complicated.

Thus was born E-COM and one of the more peculiar chapters in the history of electronic communication, demonstrating that when the government encounters a revolutionary new technology, its first instinct may be to figure out how to suck the joy right out of it.

The Internet Had a Serious Problem: It Was Too Convenient

To appreciate the unusual genius of this undertaking, we need to remember what sending a letter involved before email became routine.

First, you wrote your message. If you were particularly modern, you might compose it on a computer, although that still required printing it. Anyone who owned a dot-matrix printer during the 1980s will remember that producing a single page sounded rather like an industrial accident occurring inside a filing cabinet.

Next, you located an envelope, addressed it, and found a postage stamp. This frequently involved searching through a kitchen drawer containing expired coupons, batteries of uncertain usefulness, and approximately seventeen keys that nobody could identify.

Hopefully, you found a postage stamp, and with any luck, it was for the correct amount. The Postal Service had an annoying habit of raising postage rates just often enough to ensure that the stamps you had purchased in bulk were no longer sufficient. This meant either buying additional stamps or decorating your envelope with an assortment of smaller denominations until you arrived at the required amount. By the time you finished, your letter might have looked less like personal correspondence and more like an entry in a stamp collector’s scrapbook.

Then you carried the letter to a mailbox. That’s where the need for pants typically came into play. From there, the letter began a journey through an elaborate national distribution system involving sorting machines, postal employees, trucks, and airplanes, eventually reaching its destination several days later. And that was just one direction. If your letter contained a question requiring an answer, the recipient had to repeat the entire process, meaning a simple exchange of information could easily consume a week or more.

Of course, this represented tremendous progress over earlier centuries, when sending a message across the country could take weeks. Even the legendary Pony Express, celebrated for its remarkable speed, required roughly ten days to carry correspondence between Missouri and California. By the late twentieth century, ordinary mail was considerably faster, but it still required time, money, and a surprising amount of effort just to tell someone something.

And every letter came with a price tag. In 1975, a First-Class stamp cost 10 cents. By 2000, the price had risen to 33 cents. That might not sound particularly burdensome until you consider the cost of sending dozens or hundreds of letters, especially when every response required another stamp and another trip through the postal system.

Then came email.

By the 1990s, personal computers, online services, and Internet access were making electronic correspondence increasingly available to ordinary Americans. Suddenly, someone in Peoria, Illinois, could send a message to London and receive an answer minutes later, without purchasing postage, finding an envelope, making a trip to the mailbox, or having to clarify which definition of “pants” applied at the moment. There was no additional charge for each message, and the recipient didn’t even have to be home when it arrived.

For the Postal Service, however, this presented a rather serious business problem. Its vast infrastructure existed to transport physical objects, and email was accomplishing the same basic purpose without requiring anything to be weighed, sorted, stamped, loaded onto a truck, or accidentally delivered to the wrong apartment.

There had to be some way to participate in this new technological revolution.

Fortunately, there was.

NetPost Mailing Online: All the Complications of Snail Mail, None of the Speed of Email

On September 1, 2000, the Postal Service launched NetPost Mailing Online, an Internet-based service that combined electronic communication with conventional mail delivery. The industry called this arrangement “hybrid mail,” which sounds considerably more sophisticated than “printing out an email and putting it in an envelope.”

Here’s how it worked.

A customer prepared a letter, newsletter, advertisement, or other document on a computer. Rather than printing it and taking it to the post office, the customer uploaded the document through the Postal Service’s website, supplied the recipient’s mailing address, selected various printing options, and paid the necessary charges.

The document was then transmitted electronically to an authorized printing facility, preferably one located near the recipient. There, someone or something printed the document, folded it, inserted it into an envelope, prepared it for mailing, and placed it into the postal system.

Finally, a letter carrier delivered the finished product to the recipient’s physical mailbox.

Consider the technological journey involved. A message traveled electronically across the country at nearly the speed of light. Having arrived at a location reasonably close to its intended recipient, it was converted into paper and placed into an envelope so that a human being could carry it the remaining distance.

It was rather like inventing the automobile and then developing a system that automatically converted it into a horse-drawn carriage for the last three miles.

According to the Postal Service’s 2002 annual report, the new system offered several conveniences. Customers no longer needed to purchase envelopes, apply postage, or visit a post office. Mailing lists could be uploaded electronically, addresses could be verified, and barcodes could be added to help automated sorting equipment.

Orders submitted by 2 p.m. Eastern Time were generally printed and mailed the following business day. The service also eliminated minimum-volume requirements, meaning customers could submit relatively small mailings without first accumulating enough correspondence to justify opening a branch office.

For businesses sending invoices, promotional materials, or newsletters, these were legitimate advantages. A company could eliminate a great deal of tedious paperwork by letting someone else handle the printing and mailing.

For anyone comparing NetPost with ordinary email, however, the distinction was rather more entertaining.

Suppose you wanted to ask your brother whether he was coming over for dinner. You could send him an email and receive a response in minutes. Or you could transmit your message to a printing facility, have it folded into an envelope, and arrange for a postal carrier to deliver it after the dinner in question had already taken place.

Both systems successfully transmitted the information. One simply required the recipient to own a mailbox and possess a somewhat more flexible understanding of the word “instant.”

But Wait: The Post Office Had Already Tried This in 1982

The truly remarkable part of the story is that NetPost was not a completely new idea. The Postal Service had been experimenting with electronic-to-paper communications since before most Americans had ever heard of the Internet.

On January 4, 1982, the agency launched E-COM, short for Electronic Computer-Originated Mail.

Yes, the name was an acronym. This was a federal program, after all, and no respectable government initiative should be launched without first identifying a combination of capital letters that can be explained in a paragraph somewhere.

E-COM allowed businesses to transmit computer-generated messages electronically to specially equipped postal facilities. The messages were then printed, inserted into envelopes, and delivered through the ordinary mail system.

The program operated through 25 participating post offices nationwide. These facilities received electronic transmissions, sorted the messages by ZIP Code, and printed them on bond paper. The resulting letters were placed into distinctive envelopes displaying a blue E-COM logo.

Delivery was intended to occur within two days anywhere in the contiguous United States.

For 1982, this was actually a remarkable technical achievement. Personal computers were still relatively uncommon, and the public Internet as we know it did not exist. Businesses that generated large quantities of correspondence often relied on expensive printing equipment, mailing departments, and traditional transportation networks.

E-COM promised to eliminate some of those steps by transmitting the information electronically before creating the physical letter near its destination.

There were, however, certain restrictions.

Customers were required to transmit at least 200 messages at a time. Each message could contain no more than two pages. The service carried an annual fee of $50, in addition to charges for individual messages.

The initial first-page price was 26 cents, with a relatively modest additional charge for a second page.

Thus, if you wanted to send Grandma a quick note wishing her a happy birthday, E-COM was perfectly willing to help, provided you could identify 199 other people who also needed to hear about it.

To be fair, the service wasn’t intended for individual birthday greetings. Banks, insurance companies, utilities, and large advertisers were more typical potential customers. These organizations routinely sent hundreds or thousands of computer-generated letters, making them ideal candidates for the program.

Still, there is something wonderfully bureaucratic about inventing a new communications service and beginning with the requirement that customers have a minimum amount of communicating to do before they’re allowed to communicate.

The Government’s Electronic Mail Service Actually Worked

Despite its restrictions, E-COM attracted customers, and its usage increased considerably during its brief existence. Approximately 3.2 million messages were transmitted during its first year. By fiscal year 1983, that number had grown to 15.3 million. In 1984, the system handled approximately 23 million messages.

These were respectable figures for a technology introduced when the average American’s understanding of computers was largely limited to knowing that they were expensive, required air-conditioned rooms, and occasionally threatened civilization in science-fiction movies.

The special blue-and-white E-COM envelopes also created an unexpected benefit. Recipients recognized that the letters had arrived through an unusual, official-looking service. Businesses discovered that correspondence arriving in these distinctive envelopes might attract more attention than ordinary mail.

And which businesses were particularly enthusiastic about getting people to open unsolicited correspondence?

Advertisers, naturally.

In December 1983, contemporary reporting revealed that a suburban Detroit company called Automotive Incentive Development had accounted for between half and three-quarters of E-COM’s nationwide monthly volume during certain periods. The company specialized in sending promotional materials advertising automobile sales. Its president, James Young, reported mailing approximately 500,000 to 800,000 messages through E-COM each month.

While the Postal Service was proudly unveiling the future of electronic communication, one of its most enthusiastic customers was using the technology to inform Americans that somewhere, somehow, a car dealership was having the greatest inventory reduction sale in human history.

There is something strangely prophetic about this development, especially considering what had already happened just four years before E-COM made its debut.

On May 1, 1978, a Digital Equipment Corporation salesman named Gary Thuerk sent an unsolicited advertising message to hundreds of users of ARPANET, the precursor to the modern Internet. His message promoted the company’s computer systems and earned him the dubious distinction of becoming the man credited with inventing spam email.

Thuerk’s innovation demonstrated that the moment humanity developed a revolutionary means of exchanging information, someone would inevitably discover how to use it to sell things to people who hadn’t asked to hear about them.

By the time E-COM appeared in 1982, this particular aspect of the electronic communications revolution was already well underway. The Postal Service merely found a way to add printing costs, envelopes, and delivery trucks to the process.

Humanity would eventually create a global communications network capable of connecting billions of people almost instantaneously. A substantial portion of that network would be devoted to unsolicited advertisements, questionable investment opportunities, miracle weight-loss products, and urgent requests for financial assistance from members of foreign royal families who had inexplicably obtained your email address.

In hindsight, E-COM may have anticipated the future of electronic mail more accurately than anyone realized. The technology was new, the possibilities seemed limitless, and advertisers were already finding ways to make everyone regret it.

At least E-COM’s unwanted advertisements arrived in envelopes that could be thrown directly into the trash without having to locate an unsubscribe button that didn’t actually work.

There’s Just One Small Problem: The Math

Although E-COM was attracting customers, the Postal Service discovered a financial difficulty that occasionally troubles government enterprises: It was spending considerably more money providing the service than customers were paying to use it.

By late 1983, the agency had spent more than $40 million on the program. Congressional investigators examined its finances and found that the Postal Service was charging approximately 26 cents for the first page of an E-COM message while the actual cost of processing and delivering it had been estimated at roughly $1.50 per page.

This was a business model with certain limitations.

Imagine opening a restaurant where every hamburger costs $15 to prepare, but you sell it for $2.60. Customers would love you. Business would probably increase. You might even become famous for offering the best hamburger bargain in town.

Unfortunately, every additional customer would bring you one step closer to bankruptcy.

E-COM faced essentially the same problem, except that its customers were ordering computerized letters instead of hamburgers.

The Postal Service hoped that greater volume would eventually make the operation more economical. That wasn’t entirely unreasonable. Large systems with substantial startup expenses often become more cost-effective as their customer base expands.

However, critics argued that traditional postal customers were effectively subsidizing an electronic communications service that competed with private businesses. The more messages E-COM handled at its existing rates, the greater the concern that its losses would have to be absorbed elsewhere.

And the financial problems were about to become more complicated because, as everyone knows, when one federal agency encounters a difficulty, the obvious solution is to involve additional federal agencies.

Nothing Says Innovation Like an Argument Between Government Agencies

E-COM created an awkward regulatory question. Was the Postal Service delivering mail, providing electronic communications, or operating a hybrid business that fell somewhere between the two?

This distinction mattered because postal services and telecommunications were regulated under different legal frameworks. The Postal Rate Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, Congress, and other federal authorities became involved in disputes about the Postal Service’s authority, pricing, and potential competition with private companies.

Only the government could develop a program intended to simplify communications and then spend several years debating which federal agency was legally authorized to supervise the act of communicating.

One particularly troublesome issue involved E-COM’s prices. The Postal Rate Commission, which reviewed proposed postal rates at the time, was concerned that the service wasn’t recovering its costs.

The Postal Service proposed increasing the price of a first-page E-COM message from 26 cents to 31 cents. The Commission concluded that substantially higher charges were necessary and recommended a first-page price of 52 cents, with another 15 cents for a second page.

The Postal Service’s Board of Governors was not enthusiastic. Raising the price that dramatically, it reasoned, would make the service uncompetitive and drive customers away.

The Commission reconsidered and recommended 49 cents for the first page and 14 cents for the second.

The governors remained unconvinced.

We now had one federal body arguing that a government service needed to charge more because it was losing money, while another federal body argued that charging more would cause the service to lose customers and possibly even more money.

Both had a point, which was unfortunate because neither point made the business particularly attractive.

The argument illustrates a genuine problem involving public services that compete with private businesses. Government agencies may have obligations that private companies don’t share, but they also face questions about whether one category of customers should subsidize another.

Those are legitimate policy concerns. They are also the sort of concerns that can produce enough hearings, reports, recommendations, and administrative correspondence to make a paper manufacturer very happy.

Eventually, the Postal Service’s governors recommended selling or leasing E-COM to a private company. This would allow the service to continue without requiring the government to operate it directly.

Unfortunately, nobody offered enough money to make the arrangement acceptable.

On September 2, 1985, E-COM transmitted its final message. After approximately three years and eight months, the program was finished. The government had spent millions developing a technology that converted electronic communications into physical letters. It had successfully attracted customers, increased its volume, and demonstrated that the system worked.

It had also demonstrated that providing a service for substantially less than its cost was not an especially promising long-term financial strategy.

Fifteen Years Later, Someone Has an Idea

By the late 1990s, technology had changed dramatically. Personal computers were everywhere. The World Wide Web had become part of everyday life. Millions of Americans had discovered the convenience of email, and businesses were increasingly conducting transactions electronically.

The Postal Service was facing a new challenge. Instead of relying exclusively on physical correspondence, people could now communicate directly over the Internet.

Traditional mail remained important, of course. Businesses still needed to deliver bills, legal notices, advertisements, and other documents. Many households lacked reliable Internet access, and electronic signatures and records were not yet as universally accepted as they would become.

Nevertheless, the direction of technological change was obvious. More and more information was moving electronically, and less of it needed to be printed and physically transported.

Faced with this situation, the Postal Service examined its options and reached a remarkable conclusion.

Perhaps it should offer a service that converted electronic communications into paper.

Again.

Thus, NetPost Mailing Online arrived in September 2000, offering an updated version of the idea that had failed fifteen years earlier.

To be fair, this wasn’t simply E-COM with a fresh coat of paint. The technology had improved enormously. The Internet made electronic submission easier. Commercial printing contractors could handle production without requiring the Postal Service to install specialized equipment at dozens of post offices.

And the minimum requirement of 200 messages had disappeared. At last, Grandma could receive that single birthday greeting without requiring you to establish a commercial mailing list.

In short, the Postal Service had learned from its earlier experiment. It had identified weaknesses, modified its approach, and developed a more practical version of the original idea.

But the underlying premise remained the same. Electronic information would be transmitted across the country, printed on paper, inserted into an envelope, and delivered by a postal carrier.

The rest of the world was finding ways to eliminate paper from communications. The Postal Service was discovering new ways to produce it.

NetPost Meets Another Government Tradition: Disappointing Financial Projections

NetPost Mailing Online operated as a three-year experiment beginning September 1, 2000. Thousands of customers used the service, sending millions of pieces of mail electronically for eventual printing and delivery.

Nevertheless, the Postal Service’s financial expectations proved optimistic.

In 2003, the agency’s Office of Inspector General examined the broader NetPost Services program, which included Mailing Online, CardStore, Premium Postcards, and Certified Mail offerings. The audit found that the program had fallen short of its original financial projections.

The investigators also raised concerns about the way revised projections had been developed. Rather than adequately incorporating updated market research, the Postal Service had relied on limited actual performance data. The result was a financial outlook that the auditors considered insufficiently supported.

This was not exactly the sort of finding one hopes to receive after spending several years introducing an innovative new service.

Imagine designing a revolutionary airplane, announcing that it will transform transportation, and then discovering that your financial projections were based largely on how many people you thought might want to fly if circumstances were favorable.

The government’s response was to change its approach once again.

On September 1, 2003, the original experimental classification for NetPost Mailing Online expired. The Postal Service discontinued its direct hosting of the system under that experiment, but the service itself did not immediately vanish.

Instead, it shifted toward a privately operated arrangement. By February 2004, a company called Touchpoint, Inc., was handling the program’s operational components under a revenue-sharing agreement.

The Postal Service’s 2004 annual report explained that this arrangement had nearly eliminated the agency’s expenses associated with the service while allowing customers to continue using it. The agency expected NetPost Mailing Online volume to exceed 25 million pieces that year.

That is an important qualification. Unlike the original E-COM experiment, NetPost wasn’t simply abandoned when its initial government-operated arrangement ended. Its underlying hybrid-mail concept survived through a different business model.

After years of experimentation, financial difficulty, and operational adjustments, the Postal Service had discovered that private companies could print electronic documents and give them to postal employees for delivery.

Which, when you think about it, sounds suspiciously like what commercial mailing companies had been doing for years.

The Idea That Refused to Die

One might reasonably assume that NetPost eventually joined the long list of government technological experiments that disappeared after spending enough money to make taxpayers wonder whether the entire project might have been accomplished more economically with a typewriter and a box of envelopes.

Surprisingly, that wasn’t quite what happened.

Although the Postal Service eventually stepped away from directly operating NetPost, the underlying concept survived. In fact, a company called Click2Mail continues offering essentially the same service today. Its own terms of service identify its Mailing Online product as the former NetPost Mailing Online.

Founded in 2003, Click2Mail developed technology allowing customers to submit documents electronically and have them printed, addressed, stuffed into envelopes, and delivered through the postal system. In 2007, the company introduced an enhanced version of its online mailing platform, carrying forward the basic idea behind the Postal Service’s earlier experiment.

And it gets better. Click2Mail now offers a service called Email-to-Mail, which automatically converts email attachments into physical letters for postal delivery.

Yes, more than four decades after E-COM debuted, you can still send an electronic message to a company that will print it, stuff it into an envelope, and arrange for someone to deliver it to a mailbox. Apparently, the future of electronic communication really did involve paper after all.

Nor is Click2Mail alone. Companies such as LetterStream and PostalMethods offer similar services, allowing customers to create or upload documents electronically and have them delivered through traditional mail.

As it turns out, the idea wasn’t necessarily foolish. Businesses, law firms, medical offices, and other organizations still have legitimate reasons to send physical letters. Outsourcing the printing, folding, stuffing, and mailing can save considerable time and expense.

The Postal Service’s difficulty wasn’t necessarily identifying a market for electronic-to-paper communications. It was figuring out how to serve that market without spending more money than it collected.

And so, in an unexpected twist, the government’s peculiar experiment not only survived but became the basis for services that remain commercially available today.

It turns out that taking electronic messages and converting them into regular mail can actually be a commercially viable service. The challenge is figuring out how to charge enough to cover the cost of doing it, a concept that apparently required several decades of government experimentation to appreciate.

Was the Post Office Really Trying to Make Email Slower?

At this point, intellectual honesty requires us to acknowledge something that threatens to interfere with a perfectly enjoyable story about government bureaucracy.

Neither E-COM nor NetPost was actually intended to make existing email slower. Both were designed to make traditional mail more convenient, particularly for businesses sending large quantities of correspondence and people who needed to reach recipients without email access.

In that respect, the programs represented a reasonable effort to combine new technology with an established service. The Postal Service already had the infrastructure, employees, and delivery network to transport physical mail. Why not use electronic communications to make the process more efficient?

There is, however, a certain irony in the approach. While much of the world was discovering ways to eliminate paper from communications, the Postal Service was exploring ways to preserve its role in transporting it.

Other inventors had taken the opposite approach. Consider Almon Strowger, the undertaker who helped invent automatic telephone switching. He developed a system that eliminated the need for a human operator to connect telephone calls. Likewise, rural farmers turned existing barbed-wire fences into telephone networks, avoiding the expense of installing entirely new lines.

In both cases, innovation involved eliminating unnecessary steps or finding cheaper ways to accomplish the same task. The Postal Service, meanwhile, was trying to ensure that the technological revolution still had a place for envelopes and mail carriers.

Ironically, the Internet eventually provided the Postal Service with a much more promising opportunity: online shopping.

People could order merchandise electronically, but someone still had to deliver the physical products. The Internet could transmit an order for a pair of shoes almost instantaneously, but it couldn’t transmit the shoes themselves. Electronic commerce created enormous demand for the very delivery infrastructure that electronic communications had threatened to make less relevant.

The Internet hadn’t eliminated the need for the Postal Service. It had simply changed what people needed delivered.

Please Allow Three to Five Business Days for Your Instant Message

In the end, E-COM and NetPost weren’t quite the technological disasters their history might suggest. Both demonstrated that electronic communications could make traditional mailing more convenient, and the basic idea eventually found a sustainable commercial market.

Still, there is something wonderfully entertaining about the government’s response to a revolutionary technology that eliminated paper, envelopes, postage, and delivery delays. The Postal Service looked at all those improvements and wondered how many of them could be reversed.

And perhaps that’s the real lesson of this peculiar chapter in technological history. Innovation doesn’t always mean eliminating unnecessary steps. Sometimes it means finding entirely new ways to charge people for performing them.

In the end, the Postal Service was unsuccessful in eliminating one of life’s greatest inconveniences: Traditional mail still required someone to venture outside, which generally meant putting on pants.

And so does the mail carrier.

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