Snail mail may account for a smaller share of the messaging market since the arrival of email but Australia Post is still anticipating a bumper Christmas as paper mail volumes surge in the final days.
Forty years ago, Australia Post had 50 percent of the messaging market in the bag but since then, the population is being wired up to the cyber world and market share has dropped 19 percent.
Year on year however, Australia Post's paper volumes continue to grow.
Last year, snail mail volumes increased 6.5 percent and Australia Post anticipates it will increase 3.4 percent over the next decade - driven by customers keen to retain a more 'personal touch'.
To cope with increasing volumes, the technology behind the scenes at Australia Post has undergone a massive AU$510 million facelift over three years "to help us meet with these increased demands," the spokesperson said.
A new bar-coding system and multi-line optical character readers, which reads the entire address rather than just the postcode, have been implemented to increase efficiencies.
With Christmas just around the corner "we're currently handling three times the average daily load," an Australia Post spokesperson told ZDNet.
"We're expecting another record Christmas this year," the spokesperson said. Despite funky electronic greeting card alternatives, "people still want to send physical Christmas cards".
Although Australia Post handles 50 percent more paper mail than it did 10 years ago, new technology efficiencies mean the postal behemoth employs a similar number of staff to what it did a decade ago.
"We're clearly in the e-world ourselves," the spokesperson said.
