

In Strawberry Shortcake in Big Apple City, first broadcast in 1981, a snail delivering mail to Strawberry Shortcake, says, "Your snail mail is here." The mail has taken six weeks to get to Strawberry. Rutt later went on to become CEO of Network Solutions. In the sense of contrasting it with electronic mail, however, Jim Rutt is purported to have first used this phrase in January 1981.

In 1974, the term was used to describe second-class mail, which took longer to arrive than first-class mail. The term appears in a Russell Baker humor column about the slow speed of the U.S.
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Ads for zip code use appeared in many issues of LOOK, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post magazines and displayed a caricature of a large snail outfitted as a letter carrier, with the term "Snail Mail" in bold lettering. Post Office in magazine advertising in the mid to late 1960s to encourage use of zip codes. The term "snail mail" was used by the U.S. This was a humorous British reference to the German 'Schnell (fast) Post', which was notoriously slow.

The term "snail post" has much earlier usage, as in an article published 1843, in Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country (page 656). The term also appears as a sub-headline in a 1951 news article. The term "snail mail" appears as early as 1942 in the headline of a news article about slow mail delivery. The Philadelphia North American stated: "The markets will no longer be dependent upon snail paced mails". Similar terminology was used in the 1840s to contrast the already-operating postal mail with the new telegraph. In some countries, services are available to print and deliver emails to those unable to receive email, like people with no computers or internet access. Some online groups also use paper mail through regular gift or craft hot topics. Snail mail penfriends or penpals are those that communicate with one another through the postal system, rather than on the internet which has become the more common medium. This happened between the 1970s to 1990s. An earlier term of the same type is surface mail, coined retrospectively after the development of airmail. It is also known, more neutrally, as paper mail, postal mail, land mail, or simply mail and post. The phrase refers to the lag-time between dispatch of a letter and its receipt, versus the virtually instantaneous dispatch and delivery of its electronic equivalent, e-mail. Snail mail and smail (from snail + mail)-named after the snail with its slow speed-refers to letters and missives carried by conventional postal delivery services. For the video game, see Snail Mail (video game). This article is about the term used to describe letters delivered by postal delivery services.
