Gone are the days when people used to wait for replies in response to their handwritten letters for days and even months in the case of foreign correspondence. October 9 is widely celebrated as World Post Day, an opportunity to pay tribute to the age-old tradition of letter writing. Once, writing a letter was an art in itself. This day marks the anniversary of the establishment of the Universal Postal Union (UPU) in 1874 in Switzerland. But it was only in 1969 that it was marked as World Post Day by the UPU Congress held in Japan. Though the tradition may be celebrated every year, the service as a whole has been in decline. The condition of the service has gone from bad to worse all over the world, but particularly in Pakistan. What are the factors for its present plight? With the changing times and arrival of new technologies, the postal service has become an outdated medium of communication. Battling the notion that the Internet would eventually overpower every medium of communication, it is believed that there is still room for improvement in the postal service. It needs to become more responsive to modern technologies used in the means of communication. This is an era of new information and communication technology. The younger generation is far more accustomed to instant social media like Facebook and WhatsApp than physically written letters. Instead of sweating to write a letter, people prefer to use the Internet and rely on email messages that are delivered instantly. Another factor that has dented the business of the postal service is the opening of private courier companies at every nook and corner. These private courier operators have snatched the business of post offices and the competition has become tougher. The fate the postal service has been facing in the 21st century, was inevitable. It is also the inefficiency of those attached with the postal service that they did not upgrade their operations according to the changing times. In this digital world, they need to incorporate modern technology features in post offices too, but they are lagging behind in this field and still following the centuries old traditions. In fact, post offices never reinvented themselves in the new age of instant worldwide communications. This is the reason that the government is now converting post offices into utility bill collection centres, which is not their real function. The use of postal services has gradually been facing a decline all over the world. In the presence of modern means of communication, if the postal service does not incorporate new communication features, it would soon become extinct altogether. *