
Swiss Post Moves Some Mail Online  - peter123
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/13/technology/internet/13mail.html
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rdl
I've been a customer of the technology company behind this for a year ("Earth
Class Mail"), and love their service -- scanning postal email is the
equivalent for me of google voice transcribing voicemails.

I have used mail forwarders for about 12 years now -- starting when I was in
the caribbean to do electronic cash development and it took ~6 weeks for mail
to get to me, then when I lived on a tiny artificial island off the coast of
the UK (Sealand/HavenCo), then with the military at APO/FPO around the world,
and other remote sites.

Just forwarding mail adds one level of indirection, which is nice, but being
able to scan/email or scan/portal the mail is the killer app -- often
forwarding is high cost, high latency, and 90% of mail doesn't need to be
forwarded, or if viewed first, can be forwarded with much less time
sensitivity. Plus, there are a lot of vendors who ship none (or only some) of
their products to APO/FPO/overseas, so being able to reship packages is great.

(there's also the whole cover order issue; basically traffic analysis for
mail, without a warrant. Using multiple jurisdictions for this kind of thing
might help, but it is irrelevant to many users)

Postal remailers are also great in that they let tiny startups have 24x7 mail
coverage, let you appear to be local to a given market, etc. The combination
of postal remailers and something like google voice is great for a
distributed, small enterprise.

~~~
ggruschow
I love the idea, but doesn't $20/mo + $1.50/scan seem high?

EDIT: They raised their fees a few weeks ago.. a lot. They would've charged
$120/year to handle my business-y mail before, but now they'd charge
>$400/year. Maybe it'd make sense if I mail myself other documents I need to
scan for filing.. like 600 page legal documents.

