The U.S. Postal Service was recently asked to start delivering packages and letters based on someone’s e-mail rather than street address.
he request is from Los Angeles-based Inventerprise LLC, which wants to conduct a trial run of its so-called Shelmail e-mail-to-snail addressing system sometime in 2008.
The Shelmail proposal is noteworthy because it suggests that e-mail addresses are a better means of delivering physical mail than what the postal service uses now.
Put another way, Shelmail questions just what constitutes someone’s “address” nowadays. For now and probably decades going forward, it’s a description of a physical location, in the form “101 Second Street, San Francisco, Calif., 94105.”
An answer in search of a question?