Stamps.com

Stamps.com is a Santa Monica, California-based company that provides Internet-based mailing and shipping services.

On April 13, 1998 the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) and the E-Stamp Corporation unveiled for beta testing the E-Stamp Internet postage system, aimed at providing digitally encoded postage franks or stamps via the Internet.

Although E-Stamp was the first company to get USPS approval for beta testing and successfully brought E-stamps to market, the company did not survive the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000. In 2001 it was bought by a fellow early entrant in the digital postage market, Stamps.com.

At the launch in 1998, the Postmaster General at that time, Marvin Runyon, articulated his vision of postage being "available, on call, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week." In the fall of 2003 the likelihood of this improved when Microsoft released a beta version of its office productivity suite of programs, which includes an electronic postage capacity, through Stamps.com.

The likely impact of electronic stamps is reflected in the tenacity with which Pitney Bowes corporation, which dominates the worldwide franking and mailing machine industry, pursued legal suits claiming infringement of patents almost from the day of the E-Stamp launch.