At the same time, imagine trying to ride the wave of E-commerce when your chief product is popularly known as snail mail. That's the job of Postmaster General William Henderson, chief executive of the U.S. Postal Service.

The challenge of E-commerce for the Postal Service, as Henderson sees it, is to continue reliable, neither-rain-nor-sleet delivery of parcels and paper mail while building a new IT infrastructure that will let businesses and consumers take advantage of Web technologies.

Technologically, the Postal Service is not nearly as advanced as more-nimble private competitors, but the E-commerce seeds it has planted over the past several years are beginning to bear fruit. In August, the Postal Service introduced the first electronic stamp, called PC Postage, which lets users purchase and apply postage to envelopes from their personal computers. It's also letting high-priority mail customers track shipments in the same way that FedEx does. "Eventually, our customers will know through the Web where all their mail is, regardless of what it is or how it was sent," Henderson says.

Henderson envisions entirely new roles for the Postal Service in the Internet age. "We own the database for the physical addresses of everyone in this country. I would like to see us map that to an Internet address," he says. Such mapping could pave the way for hybrid capabilities that combine Internet services and conventional mail services to speed document delivery. It also sets up the Postal Service as a central authority for Internet-address administration and for E-payment transactions. "That should send chills up the spine of anyone concerned about privacy, free enterprise, and civil liberties," says Bill Frezza, a general partner at Adams Capital Management, a venture-capital firm.

Henderson disagrees. "Our advantage is our brand--we are a trusted third party," he says. "We have the track record to prove we can be reliable and secure."

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