What’s Behind the Title of ‘Postmaster General’?

By Ron Wiener, CEO and Postmaster General, Earth Class Mail

People are often curious why some of our senior management-team members append their corporate titles with classic “postal” titles. For example, our Chief Operating Officer is also our “Deputy Postmaster General.”

The practice started at our company a few years ago when we introduced the novel concept of Earth Class Mail online postal mail to the media and reporters often responded with confused looks. Sometimes it took them awhile to understand that we are not an email-service provider – that we instead bring analog paper mail into the digital age and provide an online alternative to traditional P.O. Box and mail-forwarding services. We tried to address this misperception by weaving the words ”post” and ”postal” into our website copy, press releases, and marketing materials – and, yes, even into our titles.

Our aim was simply to overcome the natural pattern-matching that occurs inside the human brain. When a person hears about a new concept the first thing she will try to do is match it up with something she is already familiar with ― to categorize it and learn what it is by comparison with the known. Because our company name is most often seen or repeated with a “.com” on the end of it, people sometimes automatically categorize us, at first blink, as an email platform.

When people see the postal references in our titles, usually they’ll say something like, “Hey, that’s really cute” or “I get it, you’re like the postmaster general of the Internet, right?” On rare occasions we’ve been asked, “Isn’t that title reserved for USPS employees?” or “Doesn’t the USPS have a trademark on that title?” (The answer to both questions is “no.”)

If you’ve ever had an email message bounce back because you had a typo in the address, then you may have noticed that the message is sent to you by postmaster@domainname (or less commonly, “Mailer Daemon”). As long as SMTP email has been around – about 25 years – the “postmaster” of an email service has been the automated sender of error messages to the originators of undeliverable messages. The “postmaster general” is sometimes used as the identity for the human supervisor of that email server.

Postmaster General is not exclusive to the United States – it is in fact a title used in many countries, and not very consistently. England, Canada, Australia, Sri Lanka and even the Vatican have a Postmaster General. In most countries the Postmaster General is a political appointee and holds a cabinet position. If you’re old enough, you may recall that until the Postal Privatization Act of 1970, the Postmaster General led the Post Office Department (POD) and was a member of the Cabinet. The USPS PMG is still a political appointee but is no longer a Cabinet member, and in fact his own business card now uses Postmaster General and Chief Executive Officer to mimic corporate executive titles. Technically, the Postmaster General is appointed by the USPS Board of Governors, whose nine members are each appointed by the President with the confirmation of the Senate.

In case you’re curious how the compensation of the Postmaster General, who runs a $75 billion organization, compares to that of a typical Fortune 500 CEO, the PMG earned a salary of only $186,600 per year until 2007, when he got a 39% bump up to $258,840. And there are no stock options or performance bonuses. Being the PMG of the USPS remains, after all, a government job – and the pay scale is a single-digit percentage of what the salary of corporate CEO of a similarly sized company would be. No one takes this job for the salary, stock options or a golden parachute.

There is, however, one crucial similarity between my job and the USPS PMG’s, and that has to do with the vitally important charge of ensuring our customers’ privacy and security. Just as the PMG of a postal service oversees all aspects of a large network of people and equipment engaged in the safe and secure transport of your vital documents and merchandise, so must I oversee and ensure that our hiring practices, security systems, confidentiality-assurance protocols and even fraud-prevention and -detection functions are keeping our customers’ vital information protected from malfeasance of any form.

At Earth Class Mail we are constantly investing in state-of-the-art systems to defend our data servers from hacker intrusion and denial-of-service attacks. We’ve developed patent-pending, state-of-the-art security- and confidentiality-assurance systems that employ video surveillance to make sure no information could ever be lifted from customers’ materials, much less recorded or removed in any way from our “clean room” document-scanning facilities. We work extremely hard, 24×7, to protect our customers’ mail from theft of any kind, and from accidental delivery to the wrong person (see our security webpage). Everyone at Earth Class Mail is reminded of this essential responsibility whenever he or she sees a Postmaster-something title on one of our business cards or email signatures.

We keep our customers’ mail inside secure buildings until their scanned contents are transmitted through data links as secure as those of any online banking website. This is certainly safer than leaving mail in an unlocked mailbox or a recycling bin in front of your house. Despite the fact that the inside of your mailbox is Federal property and stealing from it is a felony, there are millions of cases of identity theft every year in the United States – much of it attributable to the theft of mail or open documents from mailboxes, file drawers and trash bins.

All around the world – in countries like Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and many others – national posts are already delivering mail online in various ways. The executives of these posts did not abandon their postmaster titles when their customers’ medium of choice changed from paper to electrons. As long as we remain responsible for the sanctity and security of our customers’ confidential materials, we will continue to use these titles as a reminder to others, and to ourselves, of the import of our charge.

October 6, 2008 | Filed Under Earth Class Mail, The Postal Future 

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