Postal Service: Out of Its ‘Snail Mail’ Shell?

The emergence of electronic mail has been rough on the U.S. Postal Service, eating away at its business as well as its institutional ego. It was the wired set, after all, that coined the term “snail mail.”

But the postal service launched a limited digital strike of its own last week, unveiling a new service that will allow U.S. companies to speed up their international mailings by using electronics.

The service, called Global ePOST, is mostly designed for mass mailings of invoices, account statements and other corporate missives. It works like this: The customer creates the text of the message and transmits it by computer to the postal service. The text is then sent electronically to overseas postal stations, where the transmission is printed, placed in envelopes and delivered through the foreign postal system.

The service, unveiled at the Postal Forum trade show in Anaheim last week, costs about 50 cents per letter, about the same as traditional overseas mailings. But the letters get there four to seven days faster because the letters don’t have to be shipped overseas, said Terri Bouffiou, a spokeswoman for the postal service.

The first ePOST mailing was sent from the Anaheim event last week, when Xerox Corp. used the system to promote a new product to 10,000 potential customers in Germany. So far, the service is confined to Europe and Australia, but could soon be expanded to reach Japan and other countries, Bouffiou said.

The system does accommodate graphics, but not color, so it’s better suited to letters than catalogs, Bouffiou said. She added that ePOST marks the postal service’s first foray into cyberspace since an ill-fated corporate e-mail service was scuttled in the early 1980s.

Other high-tech services may soon follow, including an electronic postmark that would verify that an electronic message “is from the person it claims to be from,” Bouffiou said.

“We want to make sure that we have a share of all of the mail business of the future, including electronics,” she said.

To learn more about Global ePOST, companies should contact their local post office, Bouffiou said.

Greg Miller covers high technology for The Times. He can be reached at (714) 966-7830 and at greg.miller@latimes.com