USPS new high tech postal services include electronic
Ray Van Eng (03/06/97)
For example, the post office has spent $6 million so far to install computer systems in 34 cities to read envelopes with handwritten addresses. There are about 8 billion such letters that the post office has to sort every year. Though the success rate of reading handwriting is a low 10-14%, the USPS thinks it is worthwhile to expand the system to all 254 main processing sites around the country by the end of this year. The system, known as the Remote Computer Reader has a main memory bank that resided in a suburb in the state of Virginia. It actually took five years for researchers just to teach the machine on how to find the correct address block which it would attempt to read.
However, the post office will not authenticate who the sender is. To achieve that, a digital certificate is required, something that the USPS says they won't offer at least for another 18 months. But the time stamping services could be available some time later this year and it will only cost 22 cents for a basic message. Another type of electronic postmark service is also being explored which would allow you to stamp your own mail with a personal computer and be able to download "electronic stamps" via the Internet or a phone line. The USPS has a mandate to replace all mechanical postage meters like those made by Pitney Bowes with electronic ones capable of electronic postmark tasks by March 1999. Besides printing out the correct postage or special advertising message for you, the electronic postal meter will also churn out bar codes that are far more sophisticated and hold much more data than the Universal Product Code (UPC) commonly used for consumer product labeling. This bar coding system will allow the post office to collect data about you, e.g. which company you communicate with, what product catalogs you received etc. That knowledge would then be arranged into zip coded neighborhood blocks and later become the postmaster's proprietary demographic database. The information would then be used to provide value-added services for direct marketers such as helping them to distribute the right marketing material to the right group of consumers. The USPS promises that privacy issues will be respected.
|
© Copyright Ray Van Eng 1997 - 1999. All Rights Reserved.
Recently,
the USPS demonstrated a system in which an electronic time and date stamp
would be applied to a e-mail message. Such a service would verify the existence
of a document, the time of delivery, and that the message has not been
tampered with.