An all-points bulletin (APB) is an electronic information broadcast sent from one sender to a group of recipients, to rapidly communicate an important message.

[1] The technology used to send this broadcast has varied throughout time, and includes teletype, radio, computerized bulletin board systems (CBBS), and the Internet.

Different from e-mail or teleconferencing, which are designed for a limited list of recipients, all-points bulletins were digital message "broadcast systems.

Due to the rapid evolution of the internet and other technology beginning in the early 2000s, the all-points bulletin is becoming an increasingly less useful method of communicating messages, and less information is being published about it.

In 1970, Farmville Police department in North Carolina, United States, reported about their implementation of the all-points bulletin (APB) system beginning in 1968.

[8] "Five months after a firefight at Oglala, an all-points bulletin was issued by the Portland FBI for a motorhome and a station wagon carrying federal fugitives".

[9] The department issued an all-points bulletin with a thorough description of the skeleton, using x-ray data and autopsy, which received numerous responses from various missing persons bureaus.

[10] In Australia, a similar, longer acronym for the all-points bulletin that is used by New South Wales and Victoria Police law enforcement is KALOF or KLO4 (for "keep a look-out for").

[2] Politicians would use APBs "to inform constituents about their recent activities and how they stand on selected issues", improving their "interactive capability" with the electorate.

[2] Additionally, APBs had functioning two-way communication systems, where voters were able to write messages back to the politicians via the computer keyboard.

Due to this and other "additional unique features", political APBs simply offered new abilities that platforms traditional media such as newspapers and televisions at the time could not and opened new doors for politicians.

[13] A local rancher helped Cindy Salo, PhD identify an outbreak of army cutworms as the most likely cause of the cheatgrass disappearance in Nevada.

In May 2010, Scientific American medical editor Christine Soares proposed that a "modern all-points bulletin" may take the shape of what is known as forensic profiling.

Zittrain argues that in the future, the act of sending out an all-points bulletin will take the form of "asking millions of distributed scanners to check for a particular identity and summon police if found".