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Tag: mail

The Move to Ban Vape Mail

Posted in unAmerican by Adam
Posted on

The legislation to ban postal delivery of vaping products is misguided and ridiculous.

The bill is 116th Congress: S. 1253. It passed the Senate by unanimous consent, which is another way of saying no Senator could be bothered, with everything going on, to say, “I object.”

Now, the bill doesn’t get everything wrong, but it gets one thing very wrong: it adds a ban on the US Postal Service carrying vaping-related packages, either as the primary carrier or as a last-hop service for commercial carriers. (Actual tobacco products have been in that boat for some years, though cigars are exempted because enough rich fools smoke them and have a lot of clout.) Some rural customers, who are often not served by commercial carriers, will be unable to receive delivery of the products at all (though the law being amended does exempt Alaska and Hawaii, which effectively means that rural folks in those states are treated better than rural folks in the remainder of the nation).

With all the attention on the post office these days, what with Donald John Trump and his Postmaster General DeJoy trying to derail the 2020 election, and his OMB with their postal butcher’s chart, one would think the US Senate, or at least one Senator, would not want to cut off another slice of flesh, however small, from one of the most impressive and dependable government organizations. But they did, and now it’s up to the House to finish (the House had previously passed a similar bill, so it seems likely).

The basic idea behind the bill is to prevent teenagers from ordering e-cigarettes online and getting them in the mail. So far, so good. But it also prevents everyone from that basic commercial function. Commercial carriers can continue delivering the products, but only with enhanced age verification measures.

The USPS should, by rights, be able to compete with commercial carriers for revenue, given that Congress has, in their infinitesimal wisdom, requires them to generate revenues rather than funding them as part of the general welfare, as an essential government service, as the necessity they are. It’s not like the military turns a profit, but they get beaucoup. The IRS does bring in revenue, and they get mismanaged and cut down. And the USPS with them.

There is an obvious need for a modern system to verify age for all purposes online. There is also an obvious need for improving the delivery verification mechanisms. Congress has not attempted either of those things. They have simply shrugged off their duty to regulate with care. That is sad.

As the country moves toward cannabis regulation, for example, there will come a day where it will be shipped across state lines. Should the post office be banned from that? Shouldn’t there be a modern system of age verification for it? Or for alcohol. Or any other product that, by law or by a vendor’s choice, is to be age restricted?

And if no children live at an address, why shouldn’t the resident be able to register that fact and have their packages delivered as any other article would be?

The Postal Service should be modernized, including steps that protect and improve its ability to carry ballots during elections. Democrats absolutely should not assist in cynical plots to undermine a bedrock institution like the USPS.

But not a single senator—not my senators, not yours, not the best nor worst, not nobody’s—bothered to object to this bill. It is a damned shame. The weal is left unguarded, the US Postal Service is further neglected, the system gets just a little worse.

Pondering a Query Language for Mail

Posted in software by Adam
Posted on

Thinking about mail activities and how a query language and other tools might make such activities easier.

Query languages are typically used for databases. The basic formula of a query follows subject-predicate form: which entries are targeted and what to do with them.

The simplest form is “print (or return) all entries in this database.”

When you’re dealing with a single piece of mail, you don’t really need a query language. It’s just a matter of directly applying predicates to it.

But when you want to do batch operations, it seems like a query language would be much more useful.

Thankfully, there’s always python. With a few lines of this language you can do the equivalent to what you would with a query language.

Doing something like (untested):

import mailbox
import datetime

# factory to None to avoid it being an rfc822.Message
md = mailbox.Maildir('~/Mail', factory=None)
for key, mail in md.iteritems():
    if not mail['Subject']:
        date = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(mail.get_date())
        mail['Subject'] = "[Received on {0}]".format(date)
        md[key] = mail

This will set any mail missing a subject to have it say when it was received as the subject. That’s probably not very useful, but for other things it might be.

But it’s still a bit complicated, in that you need to know python and if you need to operate on several folders, it gets more complicated.

Also, given the number of systems mail might have passed through, all the different filters and handlers, each which may tack on its own special headers, mail is rather messy. Add to that the fact that you may need to leave them untouched for reasons of regulatory compliance and/or security, and the medium becomes a great joy to deal with.

My guess is that separating e-mail into the usable copy and the canonical copy is the best strategy. Every mail gets thrown in a read-only archive that’s untouched and only accessed to pull out of, and another copy goes to the user where they can mangle it as much as they please.

I’ll also take issue with the interfaces used for mail. There has to be a better way to build an interface for cases where people have to manually sort through many items.

A few thoughts on that:

  • Don’t necessarily show the user the whole mail as one piece. By breaking up subject, from/to, body, etc. and showing these independently, it may allow the user to make better judgments. They don’t have to look at the subject and the from/to, two types of data, in rapid succession.
  • Reshow the mail several times. By having it appear more than once, the user has less pressure to get it right in one go. In a normal interface, if they misfile the mail, it will be permanently misfiled. If they know they will see it a few more times, they can give their best guess and the system can sequester mail that has conflicting filings over multiple passes.
  • Show progress. The user seeing that they are on page X of Y has some idea of progress, but most systems, they’ll stay on the first page and the Y will diminish. They won’t have as clear an idea of how much they’ve accomplished.
  • Let modes be modes. While some activities eschew modal uses, others thrive as modes. Manual sorting is such an activity. Instead of trying to have the same interface function for both browsing and sorting, a dedicated sorting mode is perfectly fine.

When used with a query language, such a sorting activity might just be to weed out any false positives. Other times, the query language would be used to feed into the sorting, with sorting being the predicate.

It’s important to recognize that the use for e-mail can apply equally to any sequence of complex artifacts. It could be news, search results (web pages, library books, etc.). Currently, you get a large set of ordered results from services like Google, which you have little ability to easily cull out of. While the engineers work hard to guarantee the relevance of items, often a further search within the set would be easier left to the user when equipped with more advanced tools.