Postal Service’s digital proofing business rubs some the wrong way
After several years of disappointing performance, the Postal Service is planning a business-to-business marketing campaign to promote its Electronic Postmark online service. USPS’ commercial partner in the program, AuthentiDate Inc. of New York, will conduct the campaign.
This fresh push comes not only in the wake of lagging results but also in the face of resistance from the commercial sector. At least one company insists the Postal Service’s initiative is flawed and competes with its own services. It’s the type of complaint more agencies are likely to face as they use the Internet to serve citizens.
The USPS EPM service was launched in 2003 to provide digital authentication, time stamping and proof of delivery for electronic documents. The Postal Service has not released figures for the electronic service, but Leo Campbell, USPS program manager for EPM, said that revenues in the first seven months of fiscal 2005 equal those for all of fiscal 2004.
“Business has been growing,” Campbell said. Is the business where USPS would like it to be? “No. Absolutely not.”
Users can set up an Electronic Postmark account at www.usps.com. The service requires a digital certificate for the sender, who can either use an existing certificate or download one from GeoTrust Inc. of Needham, Mass. The only cost is the price of the postmark, which starts at 80 cents each in groups of 25 and decreases with volume.
Users download a Microsoft plug-in that adds the USPS logo to the Office tool bar. (A free software developer kit also is available to incorporate the postmark in other applications.) The user is prompted to digitally sign the document when the USPS icon is clicked. A hashing algorithm creates a digital fingerprint of the document, and the fingerprint is time- and date-stamped on a USPS server. The server then returns a postmark with the USPS logo to the user for embedding in the document.
After all this, the document itself is sent as an e-mail attachment. USPS does not have access to the postmarked document but keeps a copy of the hash for seven years in a data center operated by AuthentiDate. The document cannot be changed without altering the hash, which would invalidate the document. In addition, the document cannot be reconstructed from the hash.
In short, the service protects documents against tampering, ensures authenticity and provides a legal e-mail trail. By using the USPS service, people add legal weight to their digital signatures because the signer has, in effect, made a statement of identity to a federal entity.
That’s nice, but... In rolling out its electronic service, USPS has stepped on a few toes and had trouble generating user interest. United Parcel Service filed a complaint with the Postal Rate Commission in 1999 when the Postal Service rolled out its Post Electronic Courier Service, PostECS, which relied on a secure Web server for document handling and used e-mail for notification. UPS complained that PostECS was unfair competition with its similar service. That complaint was dismissed in 2002 after the Postal Service pulled the plug on PostECS for lack of customers.
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