The facts are that the critical mass of letter delivery has gone. It isn't coming back. Yes, I know your grandad likes receiving his bank statements in the post, and it's occasionally nice to receive a postcard from your mum when she's on holiday, but email and IM have comprehensively won. Sure, vinyl sales are up, but stamp collectors aren't going to sustain this industry.

Royal Mail should embrace this. The US Postal Service offers something called Informed Delivery. They email you a scan of the front of any envelopes they're due to deliver. That - hopefully - tells you if your Very Important Letter is going to arrive today.

The USPS already scans envelopes for internal tracking, so adding a customer facing service probably wasn't the hardest thing to do.

Royal Mail could do that. And possibly even go a step further. Why can't I pay RM to open my main, scan it, then email it to me? If I'm away from home, I get the information I want. If I need the hard copy I can ask for a physical delivery. If I don't, they can shred it.

There are services which do this - but they're mostly focussed on businesses and require you to change your primary address.

Speaking of changing address, why can't RM sell me a virtual address? I know they have a PO Box service (for £400 per year!) but with the rise in Internet shopping, privacy conscious citizens, and fears of identity theft wouldn't it make sense to offer a "PO Box light" option? Or sell one-time disposable addresses? Or let people post your things using only an email address?

Most people don't need deliveries every single day - although I'm old enough to remember the "second post" each day. Perhaps people want to specify when they want their postal mail? I work from home on Mondays and Fridays, so there's no point delivering to me outside those days. Why not let people opt-out of Saturday delivery? Or opt-in to only Saturday delivery?

Hell, combined with envelope scanning, I could tell my postie not to deliver certain items. Let them shred the junk for me! Or let me automatically "return to sender" anything for the people who used to live here.

Ultimately, Royal Mail is right - their only future is in parcel delivery. With, perhaps, a small legacy business for people who can't or won't use email. Any investment they make into innovation for letters is money down the drain.

The saddest thing is; this was inevitable. Even if they'd embraced innovation 20 years ago, that wouldn't have stopped or slowed the decline in their core business. They are selling a steam-powered product in a solar powered world.

The General Post Office was the UK communications monopoly. Created by King Charles I in 1660, it remained a fixture of British life until it was abolished a mere 309 years later.

The GPO ceased to exist in 1969. And yet, 44 years later, its brand remains seared on the flesh of the streets.

Most of the GPO manhole covers have survived for over half a century - although many are in severe need of repair. It got me thinking about the permanence of brands.

With all the pivoting, merging, de-merging, logo refreshing, updating of style guides, it's hard to imagine any modern day brands being brave enough to risk etching their logo into anything more permanent than a laptop sticker.

There are very few companies who have been in existence for over a century - and even fewer which still have the same name. Titans of our industry, such as IBM, have gone through countless name and logo changes.

There's a very real cost involved with changing a company's brand - aside from the outrageous fees from "creative consultants" there's the cost of reprinting stationery, refitting buildings, sewing new uniforms for employees, and retooling production facilities.

For digital brands, there's still a non-trivial cost associated with replacing logos on websites, updating apps, and the like.

In both cases, you need to re-educate your workforce and customers.

It's true that the GPO didn't carve their entire logo into the manhole cover. Whether that is due to technological limitations, or otherwise, I cannot say. But their identity is firmly embossed on the fabric of the streets.

Old logos persist. Old brands stick around in people's memories long after their corporate owners have discarded them.

It has been over 20 years since the Snickers bar was introduced to the UK, and many people still refer to the chocolate bar by its old name of Marathon.

There's an awful lot of nonsense talked about branding. The data continually show that older brands dominate charts which measure which brands customers trust.

We live in a world which professes to favour the new, the innovative, the reinvented - yet our actions indicate that we prefer established brands which can draw on a long history of consistency.

There's a certain arrogance about having your name hewn into the living rock. A belief that you - or your brand - is a permanent, unchanging feature of the world. Next time you're thinking about changing your logo, or remodelling your brand, imagine how much more powerful it will be to have the same designs and the same brand name reaching out through history.

A few days ago, the Post Office - in their infinite wisdom - set their legal dogs on those running Ernest Marples.

The Post Office charges for the file that they generated which converts post codes to location.  It can cost anywhere from £1,000 to £4,000 per year to get accurate data.  That's a price that I can't afford - neither can many non-profits, startups or innovators.

"I take the position that the postcode file and the data set of physical coordinates that go with it are a national asset that should be freely available to any UK citizen"  - Tom Watson MP

The Guardian has shown that there is more economic benefit to the UK by setting this data free.

So, what can be done about it?

• Sign the petition to the Prime Minister
• Write a blog post, send a tweet, and tell your friends what’s happening!
• Call, email or fax your MP

The Royal Mail is in its death-throes. It is vital that data created and supported by public money is returned to the public before it is sold off to the highest bidder... only to be sold back to us.