Mail

• Postal Service today celebrates NASA's continued exploration of deep space by issuing two new stamps featuring stunning images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope.
• A $9.85 Pillars of Creation Priority Mail stamp is being released along with a $30.45 Cosmic Cliffs Priority Mail Express stamp.
• The Priority Mail stamp features the Pillars of Creation, a trillions-of-miles-tall formation that lies 6,500 light-years away from Earth within the vast Eagle Nebula.
• For USPS media resources, including broadcast-quality video and audio and photo stills, visit the USPS Newsroom .

• To protect their users from bad actors and reduce spam overall, Google and Yahoo are implementing stricter rules for bulk email senders starting in February.
• The Sinch Mailgun survey found that 72.1% of participants have a Gmail account, 20.3% said they use Yahoo Mail and another 4.8% have an AOL email account.
• The survey found that 75.4% of consumers chose email as a preferred channel for promotional messages.
• "Email is the digital cornerstone of communications between brands and consumers," said Kate Nowrouzi , VP, Deliverability and Product Strategy at Sinch.

• This message may contain confidential or privileged Information and is intended only for the use of the addressee named above.
• If you have received this message by error, please advise the sender immediately and delete this message.
• The publication is for information purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy securities.
• Performance data does not take into account any commissions and costs charged when units of the Fund are issued and redeemed.

• For over a decade, the Post Office and its supplier, Fujitsu, insisted that the Horizon system used in its branches was completely “robust”.
• Instead, it blamed the shortfalls on sub-postmasters, made them pay the losses, and prosecuted over 700 of them.
• The multimillion-pound contract between the Post Office and Fujitsu is at the heart of the scandal.

1. The systems are too complex to understand

• It had to process all kinds of transactions, from selling travellers cheques to managing rent payments, across tens of thousands of disparate branches, using a complicated web of communications systems.
• The problem is, by outsourcing such a complex service, the Post Office ended up without the expertise to understand how it worked and what Fujitsu was (or wasn’t) doing.

2. Contracts generate perverse incentives

• But then how do they get a supplier to do everything they need and not just the things in the contract?
• This kind of “service level agreement” is still standard in many government contracts.

3. The buyer is locked in

• There’s an idea in economics that if a supplier needs to make these “specialised investments”, it’s very difficult to get rid of that supplier.
• They have a huge advantage over their competitors, because anyone else would need to make these investments all over again.
• Read more:
  Post Office scandal: why thousands of victims are yet to see justice

  This is what happened with the Horizon contract.

4. Suppliers are prioritised over workers and the public

• Horizon was responsible for processing all branch transactions and keeping track of all money coming in and going out.
• Government bodies are dependent on protecting their relationships with these suppliers and are invested in their financial stability.
• But as long as UK government bodies outsource complex, essential services, it’s unlikely that the Horizon fiasco will be the last public scandal with a government contract at its heart.

Alice Moore is a member of the University and College Union.