E-mail is highly reliable. And the sad fact is that nobody cares about security. PGP (free and open-source) gives Fort Knox security and is quite easy to use, but just try persuading your correspondents to encrypt/decrypt e-mail with it. And don’t get me started about the legality of cryptographic signatures.

The Post Office would have been smarter to play up a quality of paper mail which can’t easily be surpassed by e-mail: charm. There is something about holding a letter in your hand, a piece of paper prepared by the hands of someone you know, with the handwriting you recognize, the tidiness or wildness, the post-scriptum crammed in at the bottom, the creases and finger-smudges, maybe the yellowing at the edges. I have a letter my grandfather wrote to my grandmother when he was stationed in London during WWII; he wrote it on the day they announced victory in Europe, and he describes the street scenes and celebrations in a youthful longhand, similar to but different from the inscriptions in some of his books from when he was an old man. In another month I’ll write a letter to a couple of my little nieces inviting them (and their parents, natch) to a Christmas party. I’ll use my favorite pen and let myself go a little with the capital letters, and maybe add a sketch or two. That’s what paper is still best at.