Mail Service

The Baltimore area postal service was recently ranked seventh worst in a national survey. How's your service and delivery? We'd like to hear your experiences with mail service in Maryland.Call Sundial, The Sun's telephone information service, at (410) 783-1800. In Anne Arundel County, call 268-7736; in Harford County, 836-5028; in Carroll County, 848-0338. Using a Touch-Tone phone, punch in the four-digit code 6215 after you hear the greeting.

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.

The U.S. postmaster general told an audience of area business people yesterday that the city has the nation's most improved mail service over the past three months.Marvin Runyon, speaking at a Baltimore Chamber of Commerce breakfast at Oriole Park at Camden Yards, said Baltimore's mail delivery, considered dismal just a few months ago, has improved considerably.For every 100 pieces of mail delivered here, he said, 77 of them were delivered on time.Last year at this time, only 66 pieces of mail out of 100 were delivered on time.

A restaurant gift card is a great idea. But restaurants make it so hard. I want to know what I'm giving. I want ordering to be easy, flexible and transparent, with the option of ordering online or in person. I want to know exactly what the card or certificate looks like to the recipieents whether I give it to them in person or have it mailed to them. And I want to know the rules of engagement. So, take a minute to look at your restaurant's gift-card program. Think about if from your customers' point of view, and consider adding in a FAQ page like Ruth's Chris has. They even thought to consider that customers might want to know the answer this question: Q: What should I be looking for in the mail?

Although Baltimore's mail delivery got the worst marks in the country in a national survey, local businesses that depend on the mail give the U.S. Postal Service here mixed reviews.Late deliveries and tardy pickups were the most common complaints in an informal survey of local businesses, institutions and nonprofit organizations. A few managers voiced strong criticism, while others said the Postal Service was doing its best at a tough job.Most spoke of minor annoyances -- but in a concession to reality, none operates under the expectation that the letter carrier will deliver overnight.

Inside the cavernous Baltimore post office downtown, James A. Nemec watched as a stream of letters flew by like Indy cars through a noisy sorting machine. "I feel really confident," said Nemec, who is acting postmaster. "If the mail is inducted into this plant, it is going to be delivered." Neither he nor any other postal employee in Baltimore would have dared been so bold a few years ago. In 1994, Baltimore's mail service was ranked by PricewaterhouseCoopers as the worst in the country.

A restaurant gift card is a great idea. But restaurants make it so hard. I want to know what I'm giving. I want ordering to be easy, flexible and transparent, with the option of ordering online or in person. I want to know exactly what the card or certificate looks like to the recipieents whether I give it to them in person or have it mailed to them. And I want to know the rules of engagement. So, take a minute to look at your restaurant's gift-card program. Think about if from your customers' point of view, and consider adding in a FAQ page like Ruth's Chris has. They even thought to consider that customers might want to know the answer this question: Q: What should I be looking for in the mail?

SENDING a magazine, newspaper or postcard got more expensive July 1. So did mailing a first-class letter weighing more than an ounce. But if you think that's bad, better not look ahead: The Postal Service is heading toward bankruptcy. Delivering 208 billion pieces of mail annually to 134 million addresses is very labor-intensive. More than 80 cents of every Postal Service dollar goes to pay employees. What's left isn't enough to keep pace with rising fuel and other operating expenses. Meanwhile, more people are using e-mail, overnight couriers, faxes and the Internet.

"Disgruntled postal workers," we've heard of. But "disgruntled postal customers"? While they're hardly a rare breed, their numbers have multiplied since the recent ice and snow storms that interrupted mail delivery throughout Maryland.On two ice-coated days during the week of Jan. 16, about 50 percent of deliveries statewide were made. Just after last week's ice and snow falls, mail drop-offs were down by 10 percent, says a spokesperson for the Baltimore postal district, which includes 1,900 mail carriers and 1.3 million daily deliveries in most of Maryland.

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Postal Service reported yesterday a profit of $1 billion for the first quarter of its fiscal year, 25 percent more than forecast, as the world's largest mail operation deepened its cost-cutting. The post office cut expenses by $500 million in the quarter that ended Nov. 29 as mail volume and revenue lagged behind projections. Revenue fell $300 million short of forecasts. The Postal Service said it might surpass its $360 million profit target for the current quarter as it keeps a lid on costs.

Do you want Gmail? Of course you want Gmail. The new e-mail program from Google has quickly become the most coveted on the Internet. It has 250 times more storage space than other e-mail services. It lets you search all your messages using Google's vaunted search technology. And the design of Gmail - elegant and functional like Google itself - is a thing of beauty. But how do you get Gmail? This is tougher. You could wait until the summer or fall, when Google plans to offer Gmail to the public for free.

Privacy advocates are concerned that there's one big flaw with Google Inc.'s free e-mail service: The company plans to read the messages. The Internet search company says it needs to know what's in the e-mail that passes through its system so they can be sprinkled with advertisements that Google thinks are relevant. Revenue from those targeted ads will pay for the Gmail service, which began a test last week, offering up to 500 times as much e-mail storage as competing Web e-mail programs from Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Postal Service reported yesterday a profit of $1 billion for the first quarter of its fiscal year, 25 percent more than forecast, as the world's largest mail operation deepened its cost-cutting. The post office cut expenses by $500 million in the quarter that ended Nov. 29 as mail volume and revenue lagged behind projections. Revenue fell $300 million short of forecasts. The Postal Service said it might surpass its $360 million profit target for the current quarter as it keeps a lid on costs.

The junk e-mails just keep pouring in, like a tsunami of digital sewage. It's bad news for those of us with weak stomachs, but a blessing for technology entrepreneurs with anti-spam products to sell. Millions of solicitations for scams or smut pollute the Internet, giving anti-spam researchers plenty of material to work with. As a result, their products are getting better at distinguishing legitimate e-mails from porn and scam messages, and you can find spam filters that do a decent job. One is Spamfree.

SENDING a magazine, newspaper or postcard got more expensive July 1. So did mailing a first-class letter weighing more than an ounce. But if you think that's bad, better not look ahead: The Postal Service is heading toward bankruptcy. Delivering 208 billion pieces of mail annually to 134 million addresses is very labor-intensive. More than 80 cents of every Postal Service dollar goes to pay employees. What's left isn't enough to keep pace with rising fuel and other operating expenses. Meanwhile, more people are using e-mail, overnight couriers, faxes and the Internet.

Greetings from a couple of dinosaurs who read your column but don't own a PC. But we really want e-mail so that we can communicate with our children while we travel to places like Mexico. Can you advise us how to acquire an e-mail address and tell us of any difficulty we might expect? For several years now I have been a fan of the PocketMail service, which sounds absolutely perfect for a pair of chipper travelers who don't want to mess up vacation time fiddling with computers. For about $100 you can buy a PocketMail device that looks like one of the clamshell electronic organizers but has a telescoping device on the back that you pull out and press against the earpiece and mouthpiece of a telephone.

Patty Arrington of Glen Burnie says she gets her neighbors' mail, and vice versa, so often that they've worked out their own system for delivering it."We've got each other's phone numbers," she said. "We'll call and say, 'We've got your mail.' "Jeanne Miller, one of her neighbors on Barkwood Road, says if it snows or if cars are parked in the way, she sometimes doesn't get hermail at all.And Fran Cox, also of Glen Burnie, summed up her mail service this way: "It's gotten just about as bad as it can get."

THE CHECK IS in the mail. Oh, yeah, sure. And Montgomery Ward is going bankrupt! Try another story.Actually, the check from St. Paul's United Methodist Church for its water bill was in the mail. (And giant retailer Monkey Ward announced last week that it is reorganizing in bankruptcy court.)For those who missed the story, New Windsor cut off water service to two of St. Paul's buildings for failure to pay an overdue bill.The surprised church said that it had mailed the check to the municipality -- after an earlier mail problem prevented the church from receiving the bills from the town office.

Inside the cavernous Baltimore post office downtown, James A. Nemec watched as a stream of letters flew by like Indy cars through a noisy sorting machine. "I feel really confident," said Nemec, who is acting postmaster. "If the mail is inducted into this plant, it is going to be delivered." Neither he nor any other postal employee in Baltimore would have dared been so bold a few years ago. In 1994, Baltimore's mail service was ranked by PricewaterhouseCoopers as the worst in the country.

VATICAN CITY -- For some Italians, dropping an important letter in the mailbox is cause for a quick prayer. Mail sent through Italy's famously unreliable postal service can take weeks or months to get where it's going.But in the heart of Rome is a post office that handles mail efficiently, with no need for divine intervention.Vatican City, the 108-acre island of Roman Catholic Church rule inside the city limits of Rome, is a virtually self-sufficient nation-state with a police force and a pharmacy, a diplomatic staff, a supermarket and a range of other services available to anyone who lives or works within its confines.