E-COM: the $40 million USPS project to send email on paper

How do you get email to the folks without computers? What if the Post Office printed out email, stamped it, dropped it in folks’ mailboxes along with the rest of their mail, and saved the USPS once and for all?

And so in 1982 E-COM was born—and, inadvertently, helped coin the term “e-mail.”
↫ Justin Duke

The implementation of E-COM was awesome. You’d enter the messages on your computer, send it to the post office using a TTY or IBM 2780/3789 terminals, to Sperry Rand Univac 1108 computer systems at one of 25 post offices. Postal staff would print the messages and send them through the regular postal system to their recipients. The USPS actually tried to get a legal monopoly on this concept, but the FCC fought them in court and won out.

E-COM wasn’t the breakout success the USPS had hoped for, but it did catch on in one, unpleasant way: spam. The official-looking E-COM enevelopes from the USPS were very attractive to junk mail companies, and it was estimated that about six companies made up 70% of the total E-COM volume of 15 million messages in its second year of operation.

The entire article is definitely recommended reading, as it contains a ton more information about E-COM and some of the other attempts by USPS to ride the coattails of the computer and internet revolution, including the idea to give every US resident an @.us e-mail address. Wild.