Canada Post’s epost offers every Canadian a free, secure, spam-free email account. Unfortunately the system is a one-to-many service for sending bills and catalogs from less than 60 organizations to the 210,000 people who have signed up. (An early review of the service by Chuck McKinnon offers a good description of the service and some its usability problems.)

Communicating with other epost users is essentially impossible (although planned for, it was likely scrapped to prevent people from sending unsolicited — and unpaid for — mailings); and bill payment is still easier online through the big banks (the only epost mailing I regularly get is from Canadian Tire, and I’ve kept the bill at epost only to ensure I don’t receive a paper version.)

Seeing how well Canada Post has done, it’s almost impossible to imagine what would have happened had the U.S. Postal Service gained control of email in its formative years.

AdAge has a story about The New York Times on the Web refusing to run advertorial content without a disclaimer. Nice to see some ethical lines being maintained online. As things like Toronto’s Presto indicate, companies are increasingly trying to camouflage their corporate message to through to an increasingly ad-adverse population. At one point we will be forced to question everyone’s intentions?