(Vanity) What's going on w/ USPS.com ?

I'm hoping someone can help me here. I used (note the past tense) to buy my stamps via the Post Office (www.usps.com) web site.

I buy stamps in swoops so don't go to the site all that often. But went last Friday afternoon to buy some stamps. It let me get on, click on a sheet of stamps to move to my shopping card but the minute I pressed ENTER up popped the message that the site "could not be accessed" (or something like that). Then it rerouted me back to the Post Office store- for whatever good that would do.

Anyway, I tried later that day. Nope. Tried Sat.,Sunday. Nope. Nope. Tried on and off all this week. Nope. Tried this morning. Nope..... And always the same message, always the same useless rerouting back to the PO Store.(Where I guess they just want you to admire the stamps not actually buy anything) And, as far as I could tell, there is no customer service phone number and/or email address.

Do you know if you have cookies turned on? Some sites need cookies (especially "shopping" sites) and will fail if they can not be set.

Another possible problem is if you use an Internet "accelerator" type of program. These programs store the real (numeric) internet address for a given domain name (e.g. www.usps.com) in an effort to speed things up by avoiding an address lookup. If the numeric address of the site changes but your program still uses the old one you will get a "not found" error.

Look under C:\Windows\ for a file called "hosts", just "hosts", not hosts.something. If you have that file, open it with notepad and look for something like:
123.123.123.123 shop.usps.com

[the 123.123 bit is the numeric address and the letters are the name you type into the browser. The domain for buying stamps seems to be shop.usps.com not www.usps.com]

If you find a line like that place a "#" before the first character (e.g.#123.123.123.123 shop.usps.com) and save the file. Shutdown your browser and try again.


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It is probably just as mixed up as their post offices. Millions have been spent to enlarge to sell stamps, novelities with no one to sell them, wasted space for brochures, resulting in longer and longer lines. Why didn't they spend the money on hiring employees. Our tax dollars at work. I go to Postal Express.
BTW, a package sent by the P.O., unless priority, is contracted out to a shipper to be sent. That shipper waits until they have a whole pallet for each zip code before shipping.

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