I have to admit I missed it, but a week ago Tuesday was sort of the eighth birthday for what later became postalnews.com. It was on April 18, 1998, that I posted the following notice in the alt.snail-mail newsgroup on USENET:

From: postalnews
Date: Sat, Apr 18 1998 12:00 am
Email: postaln…@altavista.net
Groups: alt.snail-mail
For the latest postal news, check out Postal News Online at: http://members.xoom.com/postalnews/index.htm

It’s updated daily, and provides links to news stories about the US Postal Service, its employees, customers and competitors.
—–== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==—– http://www.dejanews.com/

(For those of you who may not have been surfing the web back then, USENET was a network of discussion groups that was probably the liveliest, most interactive service on the Internet prior to the World Wide Web.)

Postal News Online started on the old Xoom.com service, one of the early do-it-yourself web site hosting companies. By September of 1998, Postal News Online was attracting a regular daily readership, and I registered the domain name postalnews.com, and moved the site to a regular, commercial web hosting service.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a copy of the original Xoom site, but you can see an early version of postalnews.com, from January 1999, at web.archive.org. (Note: for some reason the Postal Service blocks archive.org on its internal network, so you won’t be able to see the archive if you’re on a postal computer.)

Google Groups : alt.snail-mail

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