The office on the inlet, which opened July 2, 1869, was the only postal outlet in colonial times within Vancouver's current boundaries. Postmaster Maximilian Michaud, who bought the Brighton Hotel early in 1869 and changed its name to the Hastings, used a grid-lined hammer enclosing the number "28" to cancel the mail. (Only a few envelopes with the "28" postmark are known; an example offered at auction in 1988 sold for over $3,000.) After B.C. joined Confederation in 1871 the post office's unofficial name, Burrard Inlet, was made official. It was renamed Hastings in 1897.

By 1874 the communities surrounding the inlet's two busy mills had grown large enough to require their own postal establishments. An office called Moodyville (the name was changed to North Vancouver in 1902) began service at Sewell Moody's pioneer mill on the north shore of Burrard Inlet on March 1, 1874. One month later the Granville post office opened in the store at Captain Edward Stamp's Hastings Mill located at the top of Dunlevy St. near Gastown. (The 1865 store is the city's oldest building; it was moved in 1930 to a park at the north foot of Alma St.) Henry Harvey, the mill's storekeeper, was the first postmaster. Granville, named after Earl Granville (George Leveson-Gower), Britain's secretary of state for the colonies, is considered the forerunner of the present-day Vancouver post office by most people.

On February 1, 1886 the post office was relocated to the back of Tilley's stationery store which stood on Carrall St. between Powell and Oppenheimer (now Cordova) near Gassy Jack's saloon in Maple Leaf Square. CPR mail clerk John Rooney became postmaster. The city was incorporated on April 6, 1886 and its name changed to Vancouver but the post office continued as Granville until the new cancelling equipment arrived. On May 1 Vancouver post office came into existence. Jonathan Miller took over as postmaster, remaining until September 9, 1908. Miller received a commission on post office revenue but no salary and also served as the fledgling city's collector, jailer, constable, court clerk and government-agent.

June 13, 1886 is Vancouver's most calamitous date. A great fire destroyed Tilley's along with just about every other building in town. Afterwards the post office was briefly housed in a shed at the Royal City Planing Mill which had escaped destruction by virtue of its False Creek site at the foot of Carrall. In July the post office moved to its own building on the north side of Hastings St. near Homer (where 325 West Hastings is located today).

July, 1886 also marked the arrival by train of the first transcontinental shipment of mail over Canadian soil. Up until this time mail from B.C. to eastern Canada had always travelled via the U.S. through San Francisco and other ports. Delivery took weeks, even months. Now a letter could be sent from Montreal to Port Moody in five-and-a-half days.

Vancouver's fast-growing business district was expanding westwards from Main St. to Granville. After less than a year, in June, 1887, the post office joined the shift moving to larger quarters in the three-storey Lady Mount Stephen Block at 309 (now 409) West Hastings. In 1892 postmaster Miller and his staff packed up and relocated yet again, this time to a fine, stone-faced federal office building that used to stand at the southwest corner of Granville and Pender. Here Miller instituted Vancouver's first home delivery service in 1895. Four letter carriers covered the area north of False Creek between Nicola and Campbell Sts.

By the end of the century Vancouver was a vigorous city of 25,000. Streetcars and the electric railway to New Westminster were pushing back the suburbs. Within today's city boundaries post offices had opened at Mount Pleasant (1891), South Vancouver (1893), Epworth (1896, now Cedar Cottage), East End (1897, at Hastings and Gore), West Fairview (1898) and West End (1898, at Burrard and Barclay). Greater Vancouver also saw an explosion of activity with two dozen offices opened west of Langley and the Pitt River before 1900.

In 1910, under postmaster Robert G. MacPherson (a former Vancouver MP), the office moved to the northwest corner of Granville and Hastings where it would stay for 48 years. Its new home had Edwardian baroque dignity, with columns, a clock tower and a granite facade. After 1936 the building underwent a major expansion; a tunnel was built to the CPR station and the lobby richly refurbished in bronze, cedar, terra-cotta and marble.

Central post office staff grew from 12 in 1895 to 700 by 1943. Trucks replaced horse-drawn vehicles for transporting bulk mail and steamships carried mail regularly to west coast ports and across the Pacific. Experimental mail flights were attempted in the region as early as 1919 but it wasn't until 1937 that regular intercity and transcontinental air mail services became available from Vancouver (with Trans Canada Airlines).

In 1938 the Vancouver post office was the site of a famous Canadian act of civic disobedience. The building was occupied for six weeks by 700 unemployed workers demanding federal relief. Rioting by more than 5,000 demonstrators caused considerable damage. Eventually the invaders were ousted by police with tear gas; 39 people were injured and 22 were arrested. In 1986 the building became part of the beautifully restored $38-million Sinclair Centre.

The current post office at 349 W. Georgia St., now known as the Vancouver Mail Processing Plant, was opened in 1958. This $13-million edifice--at the time the largest welded steel structure in the world--is a giant, five-storey machine covering an entire city block. The conveyor system, once state-of-the-art, whips mail from floor to floor, up ramps, down chutes and along three kilometres of whirling belts. Clanking mechanized parcel sorters dump boxes through slots. The building is connected to the CPR station by a conveyor-equipped tunnel but as transport by truck grew more efficient the tunnel became obsolete. By 1965 it wasn't used at all. Neither was the roof pad, designed for helicopter loads of 4.5 tonnes per wheel. Helicopter mail delivery turned out to be too expensive.

During the 1960s and '70s the central post office was the site of almost annual work stoppages and strikes by militant postal unions. Seemingly driven to a frenzy by their mechanized workplace employees fought against further automation. Letter-sorting machinery, however, was introduced in the mid-70s, at the same time as the postal code. Before this the city was broken into numbered zones for mail sortation.

Today Canada Post employs about 4,500 people in the Vancouver collection area which stretches from Hope to Squamish, including 1,200 at the plant. New A. B. Dick OCR (optical character recognition) machines each scan 25,000 envelopes an hour and read postal or zip codes. The equipment also cancels stamps by ink-jet spray and tags letters with a bar code for further sorting by other locomotive-sized contraptions. Older machinery processes big envelopes and more letter mail. Two million pieces a day are handled on average (six million at Christmas) .

Despite the technology the plant's entire third floor is still dedicated to hand-sorting irregular mail. On the fifth floor workers sit at 44 VES (video encoding system) stations reading postal codes from electronic images and keying in data. Three hundred and fifty trucks bring the jumbled proceeds of 4,100 red letterboxes into the second-floor unloading facility then take the day's tidied output to the airport, other cities and a network of local offices. At last count there were 11 postal stations, nine letter-carrier depots and 142 corporate, franchise and retail outlets in Vancouver.