I’ve long been an absolutely lustful lover of irony, so it really rang my bell when I came across what I think is the best delivery and distribution method for an e-mail newsletter from, of all places, the US Postal Service!

Okay, never mind that e-mail has definitely put a beating on the postcard market and throttled back a lot of the USPS’s volume. Forget also that its business model is ridiculous; I mean, why should it spend millions of bucks on advertisements during the Super Bowl? It’s not like there’s a competing governmental postal service. Forget the fact that it has to keep raising the price of first class postage and if it wasn’t sponsored by the government would be about as financially solvent as the majority of U.S. airlines.

Put all of that aside, because it’s finally done something right! Ironically enough it’s an e-mail newsletter.

How does it do it? Simple: You get a very small e-mail letting you know there’s a new issue, there’s a link to it, and cut and paste instructions for “troubled e-mail clients.”

Here’s a screen shot of the most recent issue’s e-mail:

Here’s a link to the live document.

When you follow the link, you get a PDF. Perfect - You can save it, print it, and send it to a friend. It’s going to look good in any browser and on any OS platform. PDF docs are now fully searchable and indexable, not to mention with some of the new stuff in Acrobat 7, extensible.

Its distribution and delivery method is so fantastically simple that it’s just about perfect. It overcomes almost all the issues we normally have to balance such as file size, cross browser rendering, etc.

Don’t you just love the irony?

***UPDATE***

By the time I even finished this article, I got my next issue of its newsletter and guess what? The USPS has changed it from the methodology I was just lauding to your typical HTML e-mail newsletter. Aah, that is the government acting as expected!

Chris Leeds, MVP, WPD
Chris Leeds is a longtime digital photographer and Web enthusiast.

Chris has recently developed and released a software product that allows Webmasters to create Web sites that can be edited by their clients with just a browser.

Chris also maintains and operates Northeast Digital Photo.

Chris has additionally had “Tips and Tricks” and numerous articles published, on Microsoft’s site and other locations, regarding various facets of FrontPage and recently served as a technical reviewer for the O’Reilly Press “FrontPage 2003 the Missing Manual.”

[tags]chris leeds,newsletter,usps,pdf newsletter[/tags]