Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/29/mail-an-old-fashioned-letter.html
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Now if they can just get someone to compose the letter for you and buy a machine to write it out in longhand they’ll basically have that company Joaquin Phoenix worked for in Her.
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bbc click actually did an item at the weekend on ai that can nearly copy your handwriting
quid pro quo
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That’s what I was thinking…
Where have I heard this phrase before?
And to heck with the email addresses, what are they doing with copies of the actual letters?!
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I’m writing a letter right now.
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They should start up a subsidiary that will take a letter, run an OCR scanner over it, and email you the results.
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No joke, I recently was filling out some forms, and failed to send in a page that was completely blank did not need to be filled in. They wrote back and attached the page in question, asking if I could print it out and send it to them.
I asked if it would be ok if I printed the page, scanned it, and emailed it back to them. They said that would be ok.
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Jesus, that’s like discarded plot from Brazil.
I would’ve scanned a different blank page on principle.
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The USPS used to let you do this back in the early 1980s, but “free enterprise” shut them down. I thought it was a great service. Does this service let you upload a letterhead image? The USPS version in the 1980s did. As they say, all things old are new again.
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What type of end-to-end encryption do they use?
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A couple months ago I sent an old friend a letter delivered by raven. (Well, delivered by a dollar-store plastic crow with a scroll attached to its leg but close enough)
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This brings me back to the early 1990s when I was in charge of academic computing at a small college. I was chatting with my colleague at Dartmouth about how hard it was to get some of the older folks on campus to accept this newfangled email thing. He explained that they gave every professor and administrator at Dartmouth an email address. Then they did a daily print out of letters addressed to those who did not log in to email. This fellow spoke to the mail room first, bur rather than saying anything about email (which might have alarmed the mail room staff) they simply asked “If we give you a pile of letters, each with the person’s name in large print at the top, can you fold them and place them in their mailbox?”
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I work somewhere exactly like that.
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wrap-a-belt-around-a-stick factor authentification
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Now I feel silly for sending out postcards.
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You can do that online too. It’s nice because that way the postcard gets back before you do.
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I vaguely recall someone posting here about setting a recycle box next to their mail box with a sign saying to put all the junk mail directly into the recycling box and the post master (or some sort of upper management) swinging by to have a chat about why that was going to be a problem. But maybe they were just paraphrasing this episode. 
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Flashback indeed, Canada Post had roughly the same service in the 80’s. As a kid, who was already using FidoNet a bit, this seemed a bit odd even then.
