Someone whom I’ve known since elementary school celebrated his fiftieth birthday this week. On July 1, Mr. ZIP reached the half-century mark. His invention brought efficiency changes to the U.S.

The ZIP Code was launched 60 years ago this month as part of a program of improvements to increase postal delivery speed. At the time, Americans were already struggling to adapt to three-digit area ...

Mr. ZIP, informally "Zippy", was a cartoon character used in the 1960s by the United States Post Office Department, and later by its successor, the United States Postal Service, to encourage the ...

Most kids I knew didn’t worry a lot about weirdo strangers bothering us in an early 1960s version of Nashua, especially if we stayed clear of certain neighborhoods our parents liked to call “rough” or ...

On July 1, 1963, the U.S. Post Office Department introduced the ZIP code program to get a handle on the heaping surplus of mail. Today, those five digits represent much more for American society. Back ...

Previously on You’ve Got Mail, we looked at a few services that were designed to speed up the mail at various points along the way. But these improvements were all taking place on the USPS’ side of ...

Before e-mail or cellphones or even the fax machine came a revolutionary advance in how people get information to the right destination: the ZIP code. Fifty years ago this week, the U.S. Postal ...