SNAIL MAIL STRUGGLES TO SURVIVE

As businesses big and small wire themselves into high-speed electronic communications systems, their reliance on traditional mail will inevitably lessen. In the long run, that could leave the U.S. Postal Service, with its 40,000 branches, 780,000 employees and $50 billion annual budget, as one giant piece of roadkill on the information highway.

While the total volume of mail delivered by the post office has actually risen 5% since 1988, business-to-business mail during that same period dropped an alarming 33%. Most of that, the post office acknowledges, has been lost to fax machines, E-mail and electronic funds transfers. Among the many reasons: E-mail sent via the Internet arrives instantly, provided it is addressed correctly, while the post office is lucky to deliver 80% of first- class letters within three days -- an average that has caused the netheads of cyberspace to dub it ``snail mail.'' Moreover, one never reads about thousands of electronic messages being misplaced for years and turning up at the wrong address.

Even before the loss of traffic to the Internet and related technologies, government-operated mail service was losing the overnight letter- and parcel- delivery businesses to firms such as Federal Express and United Parcel Service. So far the post office has held its own because of the growing volume of mail between businesses and homes, mainly catalogs, credit-card offers, bills and payments. But as more private citizens get computer- connected, even that revenue source will face fierce competition from electronic shopping and banking services. America Online, for example, gives its members access to a service called 2Market, allowing them to browse for products online and order electronically. Since purchased goods are delivered by either FedEx or U.P.S., these transactions entirely circumvent the Postal Service.

U.S. Postal officials counter that their service is truly universal, whereas their electronic predators are unduly optimistic about how widespread the new communications infrastructure will become. Faithful human couriers still haul letters by mule train to the Havasupai tribe in Arizona and don Santa suits to deliver cards and presents at Christmastime. Besides, the 206-year-old service is planning for its survival -- experimenting with ventures ranging from stamp collectors' services on CD-ROM to the certification of business- related electronic communications, similar to what it now does for postmarked, certified and registered mail. Another scheme would locate electronic kiosks in post offices, allowing Americans without private Internet connections to exchange E-mail and tap into online services offered by a growing number of government agencies, including the Social Security Administration and the Federal Communications Commission.

The trick will be to keep up with the competition while maintaining universal delivery. That famous promise -- ``Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers . . . '' -- engraved on New York City's main post office has a more reassuring ring to a citizen whose new 100-megahertz multimedia PowerPC just crashed for the third time. By Suneel Ratan/Washington