That would make a ton of sense to me. It fits in with the USPS' existing mission, and would ensure a brick and mortar location citizens could prove their real physical identity to regain access to their online account.

It probably wouldn't help you escape email ads though, the USPS is heavily funded by bulk mail.

The USPS is a terrible spam blocker.

Oh, definitely, but it'd at least (ideally, though not necessarily) make it easy to filter for messages from e.g. official government accounts or real individuals something like that. I wouldn't expect any spam blocking from them, really, but rather an easy way to isolate the important messages. Which is like spam blocking, but in reverse, and is something they could be uniquely positioned to do very effectively.

Then again, they allow mail that fraudulently tries to appear "official" or important when it's just an ad (and sometimes an outright scam!) so all that would have to be legislated to ensure it happens, I suppose. Would love to see "mail system reform" on a party platform, but I guess that doesn't get the voters out.

More than likely the USPS would be motivated to build an excellent spam blocker, and then charge bulk mailers for delivery. =) The USPS doesn't "block spam" physically because the USPS gets most of their revenue from it.

The government should keep their hands as far away from e-mail as possible. This is a solved problem since decades ago. There are great working e-mail services that anybody can afford. The government is not a God who will step down and make everything all right.

> This is a solved problem since decades ago. There are great working e-mail services that anybody can afford.

I disagree, based on accounts by librarians that they're becoming tech support of last resort for various unaccountable and uncaring email providers that the most vulnerable in society are trying to use just to get by, causing basically everyone involved to be miserable and worse-off than they might be in a better-functioning system.

I don't think government should be the only provider (and I don't think I even implied that?) but do think that if one of the main ways of interacting with vital government and private-sector services is going to be email—and it is—then it makes a lot of sense for the USPS to provide a viable option for that, for basically the same reason that it makes sense to have a USPS at all.