Saturday mail delivery is safe … for now.

The USPS Board of Governors announced last month that it wouldn’t be discontinuing the practice in August, as it had previously planned.

That will come as good news to some (including us here at the Gazette-Journal, who rely on it for home delivery), but to others who find themselves relying increasingly on e-mail, digital magazine subscriptions and online bill payments, it may mean very little.

The decision was made because Congress recently passed legislation as part of a broader funding bill requiring Saturday delivery.

It’s a difficult position for the USPS. On the one hand, the service is supposed to be a self-sufficient entity (even though it is currently losing an estimated $25 million a day). On the other, it is accountable to Congress for how it runs its business.

This quasi-public/quasi-private relationship presents major problems for the Postal Service. The USPS ran headlong into this in 2006, when lawm...