I don't think there are any good songs about love emails.

Am I wrong?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carrino. The pen might be mightier than the sword, but these days physical letters are having a tough time competing with emails and text messages.

The Office of the Inspector General reports that the volume of first-class mail delivered by the U.S. Postal Service dropped 52% between 2008 and

2023, mostly due to the rise of smartphones and digital communication. Years of financial troubles

and political turmoil at the post office mean that those still sending letters are experiencing

longer delivery times. That's leading

customers like Marketplace producer Alice Wilder to consider switching to digital messages,

even for romantic dispatches. My boyfriend David and I communicate typically over distance.

I'm in Durham, North Carolina. He's 800 miles away in Lake Forest,

Illinois. Early in our relationship, we started sending each other love letters. But this spring,

those letters started taking longer and longer to arrive in my mailbox. The lady just left. Let's

see if she brought me my love letter. Drunk mail, nothing else.

A letter that David mailed in March still hasn't showed up.

So I called up Karen Holt,

professor of political science at Virginia Tech,

and an expert on the USPS.

She still loves handwritten letters.

I prefer, at least for some kind of personal messages to go through

regular mail. Like we send emails, we do other kinds of things. And so I think that's among the

revenue concerns that the Postal Service has faced. And the Postal Service says that decline is

mostly because of what it calls electronic diversion, romantic, I know. Basically, we're doing all

...