Mail

If all goes as planned, sometime this morning a spacecraft will blast off from its launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and ride a fiery plume of contrails upward through the pre-dawn darkness to begin a two-week journey to the International Space Station and back. But the flight won't be just another NASA resupply mission. Instead, the Falcon 9 rocket and its unmanned Dragon cargo capsule built by Space Exploration Technologies Corporation - SpaceX for short - will be the first commercially owned and operated vehicle ever to rendezvous with the station's orbiting astronauts.

With residents being bombarded by fliers, robocalls, even a telephone opinion survey, the fight over the future of the former Solo Cup site in Baltimore County is taking on the trappings of a political campaign. As the debate continues about whether the county should allow a Wegmans supermarket and other development at the former manufacturing plant on Reisterstown Road, two other developers in the area are fighting the project — and each side is trying to rally community support.

Years ago - 2008 to be exact - I wrote about a $336 million settlement that required Visa, MasterCard and Diner's Club to return foreign transaction fees paid by those traveling outside the country or who made overseas purchases online. The trio had been accused of hiding these transaction fees. They didn't admit any wrongdoing. At the time, I encouraged readers affected - those paying the fees from February 1996 to November 2006 - to fill out a claim. The refund was expected to take up to 18 months.

Wells Fargo borrowers potentially eligible for mortgage rate reductions under the national settlement with big banks are being notified this month, Maryland's attorney general said Friday. The lender is mailing out rate-reduction offers in waves, meaning that some borrowers already might have received their letter, said the office of Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler. In a statement, Gansler urged homeowners to "respond as soon as possible. " Those who don't get an offer in the mail by the end of May but think they're eligible should call the bank at 800-288-3212, he added.

Regarding your article on expanded testing for sexually transmitted diseases ("In-home kits aim to get those at risk to test for STDs," Feb. 22), using the mail to distribute such kits is a good idea. Many young people today are not practicing safe sex, yet parents often don't take their children to get tested because they are embarrassed, don't have time, or don't realize their kids may be infected. Some young people think that if they don't have any symptoms they are not at risk.

In her 24 years of delivering mail to hundreds of East Baltimoreans, Earline Bushrod has faced all manner of weather-related challenges. She says the worst mishaps occur when things aren't what they seem. An example? Stepping into 2 feet of snow when you're expecting only a few inches. "It just leaned me over a bit," Bushrod said as she stumbled before regaining her balance during her route. "But I'll continue to do what I do." Bushrod, 54, and the rest of her fellow postal service workers went back to business Thursday while city, state and federal employees had another day off. Baltimore streets were largely clear, but pathways to mail slots at many homes were not, after two 20-inch-plus storms in five days.

Ever since Congress stupidly decided to make the U.S. Postal Service a quasi-private entity, the organization has been going steadily downhill. The arrangement has grossly inflated the ranks of upper and mid-level management, people who have nothing to do with the post office's actual mission of delivering the mail. On top of that, some upper management idiots decided to spend millions of dollars on changing the design of the Postal Service's logo and are now engaged in a massive TV advertising campaign to get people to ship more packages by USPS.

Mail carriers will attempt to resume deliveries today, according to the U.S. Postal Service. Deliveries were canceled throughout Maryland on Saturday due to the snowy weather, said Postal Service spokewoman Freda Sauter. On Monday, "carriers will make every attempt to deliver as long as there's safe conditions," she said. Residents are asked to clear a path to their mailboxes to ensure it is visible and safe to access. Mail will not be delivered if carriers deem conditions to be unsafe, according to the postal service.

By all accounts, Bob Morse is a solid citizen who runs a small wedding video and Web design business in northern California. So why did he send an e-mail peddling hard-core Russian pornography to Francis Uy at the Johns Hopkins University? The short answer: He didn't know he'd done it. For Uy, who works at Hopkins' Center for Talented Youth, the Russian porn offer was just one of 77 junk messages that landed in his home and office inboxes that day. From all that garbage, he had to fish out 16 e-mails that were actually for him. Both men were victims of an assault that has turned the Internet into a war zone - a contest of wills between spammers and those who would stop them.

A Columbia postal carrier found a ready solution to lugging around her sack of mail during the recent record-breaking heat. She tossed it into the woods.The carrier -- temporarily hired to fill in for vacationing employees -- dumped the mail from more than half her route into a wooded area Saturday near where Columbia carriers often stop to eat lunch, postal inspectors said yesterday.The inspectors say they believe the carrier just didn't want to deliver mail anymore in the 102-degree heat.

Key senators reached a tentative agreement Tuesday to save a mail processing center considered significant to the Eastern Shore economy but left the fate of more than a dozen post offices in the Baltimore region uncertain as they considered a sweeping bill to overhaul theU.S. Postal Service. The underlying bipartisan legislation, which is poised for a vote in the Senate Wednesday, would allow the cash-strapped mail service to inch closer to ending Saturday delivery after a two-year waiting period and also restructure the way it pays retiree health benefits - potentially saving the agency billions of dollars a year.

A computer thumb drive that was lost in the mail with the names, Social Security numbers and salaries of some Under Armour employees was being sent between two offices of PricewaterhouseCoopers, an auditing firm used by the Baltimore-based sports apparel company, an Under Armour official said Monday. "The thumb drive was not mailed from Under Armour to PwC. It was mailed between PwC offices," Under Armour spokeswoman Diane Pelkey said in an email. The breach of payroll data was first reported by Ohio's Dayton Daily News, which last week obtained an internal memo sent by Under Armour to its employees about the incident.

The names, Social Security numbers and salary information of an unknown number of Under Armour employees might have been exposed when a thumb drive containing payroll information was lost in the U.S. mail, according to a published report in Ohio. The Dayton Daily News obtained an internal memo from the Baltimore-based sports apparel maker to its employees last week. The emailed memo reported that an unencrypted thumb drive containing employee payroll information was lost in the mail on or about April 12. The thumb drive was sent by mail to Under Armour's auditing firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, in connection with an audit.

Kathie Jones loses more than patience when the mail is late. She also loses customers. As the owner of a small business that prepares bulk mail for delivery by the U.S. Postal Service, Jones hears complaints every time a church newsletter or a political ad she sends arrives late — even if the delays are not her fault. If mail is lost, she has to start projects over, sometimes eating the cost. So Jones is understandably wary about a Postal Service proposal to close the last mail-sorting hub on the Eastern Shore, located a few hundred feet from the Easton Municipal Airport.

Bernard Sadusky, the interim state school superintendent, sent a note to local school superintendents on Tuesday afternoon after the state police told him that schools should be on the look out for suspicious letters. Several schools in the northeast have been sent letters containing white powder in the mail with a Texas post mark. The letters were a hoax, and none were sent to Maryland schools that have been discovered. "We've not as yet heard of any instances, but we can't be too careful," said Bill Reinhard, a spokesman for the Maryland State Department of Education.

My husband and I have long used a post office box at the Roland Park post office for business mail. Our street address includes the letter “B,” which presents a problem for mail sorters and carriers, who don't know that our house is separate from the one next door with identical numbers, but no letter. The post office box has always been a prompt way to receive mail until recently. Mail addressed to our box now seems to arrive later than mail that comes to the house.

One ugly comment.That's all it takes for Joe Collins to leave a neighborhood without delivering the mail."The first time I hear 'Where the [expletive] have you been all day?' I'm out of there," said Mr. Collins, a Southwest Baltimore letter carrier. "There are routes that I'm afraid to go on."It wasn't like that 10 years ago. These things used to be unheard-of."The unheard-of has become common in certain parts of Baltimore, and few people deal with it as much as those who daily cover 18,738 miles of city sidewalk to deliver the mail.

I used to think no one in the whole world hated e-mail more than me, but that turns out to be wrong. Doctors, it seems, really hate e-mail. In fact, a new survey shows only 31 percent of doctors use e-mail to answer questions from patients outside the office. The rest still prefer the time-honored method of having a bored receptionist take your call, then calling you back days later, usually after your symptoms have subsided. According to a recent Associated Press article on the survey, there are lots of reasons doctors don't like e-mail.

Years ago - 2008 to be exact - I wrote about a $336 million settlement that required Visa, MasterCard and Diner's Club to return foreign transaction fees paid by those traveling outside the country or who made overseas purchases online. The trio had been accused of hiding these transaction fees. They didn't admit any wrongdoing. At the time, I encouraged readers affected - those paying the fees from February 1996 to November 2006 - to fill out a claim. The refund was expected to take up to 18 months.

Holding an election is an expensive business. State and local governments must coordinate to recruit, train, supervise and pay civic-minded poll workers who come early and stay late to set up and tear down polling places all over Maryland, consuming millions of dollars from our state and county treasuries. Special elections, required by law to fill vacancies in county councils and the House of Representatives, are among the most expensive elections we run. Current law requires holding both primary and general "special" elections, requiring expenditures and planning similar to those of regular elections.