Good and bad news for snail mail fans: To save money the U.S. Postal Service won't close your local branch, but it might reduce its hours to as little two a day.

The new plan, announced Wednesday, counts as good news compared to the headlines we've been running lately. But it still stinks for people who actually use these rural post offices. And those are the people who fought against closing the 3,700 rural post offices that had been on the chopping block. Now you're going to have to plan your visits a lot more carefully. And a lot more outposts are going to have their hours shortened than would have been shrunk, The Washington Post's Lisa Rein reports: "In the last year, officials studied roughly 17,000 rural post offices in the network, a majority of which lose money. They concluded that 13,000 of them — scattered across the country —should operate on a reduced schedule, staying open anywhere from two to six hours a day." A list of those offices will be available after 4 p.m. Wednesday on the U.S.P.S. website.

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Adam Martin