Snail Mail As E-Mail

techcon writes "An Australian startup Planetwide has launched an interesting product called Scan Me. The idea is simple, you redirect your snail mail to them and they scan your physical mail and email it all to you as a text searchable PDF. Targeted at the world wide traveller, it also looks like a good way to help prevent identity theft and getting nasty white powder in the mail."

I use a similar service already

[Nugget]

I have been using a similar service from PayTrust [paytrust.com] for about a year now. Their focus is on bills, which is really the only mail I receive that I want to ensure I handle in a timely manner. I travel quite a bit for work and find it invaluable to be able to receive and pay my bills while on the road.

When a new bill arrives, I get an email and I can view the scan of the bill online through the paytrust website. I can pay the bill automatically, if I choose, by establishing per-payee rules (always pay bill [foo] as long as it is under [y] dollars) and that sort of thing.

At the end of the year they send me a CD-ROM that contains all that year's bills and payments for my archives, allowing me to store everything in a much more space efficient way than I'd have with paper files.

It's a great service, although I don't know that I would find much benefit if they started handling all my mail and not just my bills. Mail I get is either bills, junk, or physical things which I wouldn't want in scanned form.

UK did it first

[skinfitz]

UK Royal Mail has offered this as a service for some years now.

Re:The real question!

[tjohns]

Actually, it looks like you can. From the article [planetwide.net]:

Your mail items are stored in secure storage facilities...You can contact us as often or as little as you like. We will forward the originals to your address.

They'll probably charge you postage though. However, as somebody else mentioned, you can always just print the mail from your computer.

USPS approach to E-mail

[Animats]

From the article:

• It's worth noting, perhaps, that in the early days of the Internet, it was proposed that the U. S. Post Office manage e-mail. Electronic messages would come to your local post office and then be delivered to you along with the regular mail. The proposal was not considered for very long.

No, not only was it considered, it was actually implemented and deployed. It was called E-COM [stampsjoann.net], and it operated from 1982 to 1985.

And it was really dumb.

The USPS put in a system with a mainframe computer and "high-speed" printers in major regional post offices. Mailers could submit mail jobs as IBM remote job entry jobs over dedicated SNA links. The interface was so one-way that error messages came back as paper mail a day or two later.

E-COM was for first class mail, sent in bulk. You had to send at least 200 letters to a single regional post office in a day, so it was useless for general business mail. It cost as much as first class mail, so it was useless for advertising. Mailers couldn't have a return envelope included, so it was useless for bills. Western Union did establish an extra-cost consolidation and routing service, so you sent your mail to them and they routed the messages and batched up jobs for the USPS. But few people signed up.

I do some like this....and love it!

[eberry]

I have been receiving bills like this for around 3 years. Every bill I receive is scanned and I can view them online. It has been a great boon as a consultant as I don't have a pile of [overdue] bills waiting for me when I get home. Plus I can run reports and see exactly when something was paid and how much was spent.

Since it scans the entire bill I am able to view detailed information. Such as, I can view natural gas and electric usuage and see if that new furnace and air conditioning unit are actually paying off one year later (something I did about a month ago.) Sure you can keeps years of paperwork in a box, but that's not searchable.

I receive 100% of my bills in this manner. I will never go back!

Sounds a lot like an old idea...

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Back in WWII the Allies used a system call Victory Mail, or V-MAIL, [si.edu]. You would write your message on a postcard that was microfilmed, shipped to the destination, and printed out.

They could pack hundreds of times more V-mail in a container than standard post. When just about every ship crossing the sea was needed for the war effort, this was a Good Thing.

Re:I use a similar service already

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"The banks in Norway has been doing this for year already. With no or low cost, and no paper; the bills are electronic."

I get an electronic bill from most of the companies I do business with, but they also mail me a paper bill.

We have online bill paying, you know. And online banking. We've had this for years now. Few people still use checks (replaced by debit and credit cards) but they can still be extremely convenient when you want to pay someone who doesn't have a debit card machine (or don't want to pay the fees of services like PayPal). Frankly, though, I don't know why people use checks still; every store and every resturant takes debit cards and credit cards.

In the US, you can buy a bus ticket using a debit or credit card. In major cities they have machines where you can insert a card and get a ticket. In Washington DC, they have the Metro system, which is quite efficent.

So, why exactly do we need to get into the "modern age"? Your post cited these reasons:

- Electronic bills (US has this)
- Internet banking (US has this)
- VISA Coverage (US definately has this)
- Bus ticket with VISA (Yep, got this)
- No Checkbooks (No one's forcing you to use them)
- No Bills (A paper trail doesn't vanish - online bills can)

So, why exactly does the US need to get into the "modern age". This sounds like one of those mis-informed "European wireless is cheaper and the US doesn't have GSM" posts.