I was ruminating the other day over the fact that the last thing that keeps me from being able to be truly mobile was my paper mail. I arrived home from a trip to find that a bunch of critical mail had backed up and needed my immediate attention. I remembered seeing some sort of mail handling service online that receives your mail for you, scans it in a secure building by veterans with security clearance, allows you to view it online and decide if you want to shred it, download a pdf copy, or forward it. (You can also have it thrown away but I wonder why one would choose that over shredding?) You can continue to receive your magazines and personal correspondence at home. It’s called Earth Class Mail and I love it!
Here’s a quote from their website:
Just like email and voice mail, your postal mail can now be instantly available to you, online, no matter where you are. Use your downtime to save yourself the later headache of Mail Pile-up Syndrome.
Postal mail got you down? We can guess: you’re hyper-connected with a wireless laptop and a PDA that gets email, but you check your postal mail — at home and at the office — only after an exhausting business trip. That is, you manage postal mail the same way Ben Franklin did. But you know the benefits of being totally connected to email and voice mail no matter where you are.
If you use cell phones instead of phone booths, voice mail instead of a secretary or friend (when was the last time someone took a message for you?), if you use email or faxes in place of much postal mail, then you already know what 21st-century technology can do for mail. And no one in the world but us is doing it.
In my case this is an awesome service. I have business and personal mail and want access to it while I travel. As soon as a piece of mail comes in I get an email and I can view the envelope in their virtual mailbox center to see what I want to do with it. If it looks like I need to see what’s inside I have them scan it and it’s available the next day for viewing. The assumption is – and I think this will prove to be true for almost everyone – that you really don’t need almost any paper copies of mail anymore except in rare cases. Even billers will accept e-checks from banks without the invoice stub attached. For that really important stuff they will forward it at a really reasonable cost but I don’t think I’m going to need hardly anything sent to my physical location.
I was going to have my business mail forwarded from my USPS post office box to my home address or wherever I happened to be but their premium mail forwarding service costs at least $40 per month. Ouch! Here’s the pricing for the Earth Class Mail service. I went for the Silver Plan and paid for the year.
It looks like they will soon offer check processing via ACH. Considering the cost to process your own checks (time, energy, and gas $), this is an awesome feature.
Just in case I’ve butchered the description of what this is here’s another blurb from their website:
Here’s how it works. First, you pick a “DCI Remote Address” at one of our locations, and have selected time-sensitive mail sent to us (you can keep sending packages, magazines and anything else you wish to your current address, if you like). As a Commercial Mail Receiving Agency, we are then able to pick up your mail from the Post Office every day, instantly scan in all the envelope images, and then, voila!, electronically deliver each envelope image to you online. You decide what happens next . . .
There is one other service out there PaperlessMail.com that does a very similar thing but I just don’t trust them for some reason. It doesn’t look legit enough and I don’t want important mail going to someone I don’t trust. Plus they only have one location, so they can’t be very big. I like the security that Earth Class Mail is providing.
If you are a user of this service or end up becoming a user, come back and tell me what you think. I’m still a pretty new user myself but so far think it’s great.
