Reading Your Postal Mail Online

An anonymous reader writes "Remote Control Mail gives us one more reason not to leave our computers. Their service lets you access your postal mail on the Web. They offer scanning of mail contents, shredding, recycling and shipping. There's a good writeup on Techcrunch, complete with a CAD animation showing some robotics technology (Flash Movie) that RCM is developing to automate mail handling. The service costs $25 to get started and $20 a month for individuals." Now if we could only reply the same way.

Shredding Is Now Easier

[hondo77]

I bought a new shredder [fellowes.com] a few months back (thanks for the bargain, eBay). It's powerful enough to shred the whole envelope and its contents without opening, even with those fake credit cards inside. Junk mail management is now so much easier.

Reply online too!

[tedhiltonhead]

> Now if we could only reply the same way.

You can, with USPS's (US Postal Service) NetPost service [usps.com]

Re:Excellent

[Lumpy]

The only thing that will solve that is someone going and physically beating the crap out of the executives and Finance departments at these companies. Here in Michigan several of the utilities CHARGE EXTRA for you to pay electronically. Yes, the payment method that is cheaper for them costs you more! There are 3 companies I still send a check in the mail for them to have someone physically handle,open and input the payment instead of having it 100% electronic and therefore cost less.

check out paytrust...

[pw700z]

http://www.paytrust.com/ [paytrust.com] - They receive your bills, open them, post them online, and allow you to pay them. It's awesome... i've moved 4 times since i started using the service, and only had to notify the gas/electric company!

Re:Doubleplusgood!

[Josh Lindenmuth]

Snail mail would be private if it got to the desired recipient 100% of the time. About 1/2 of my mail ends up in a neighbor's mailbox (and vice versa). I can't tell you how many times I've had an important bill (such as property tax) delivered by a neighbor who accidentally received it. Every time we call the post office, they ask us to file a report (which we do), but nothing changes. Luckily we live in a pretty trustworthy neighborhood, or I'd be in trouble.

Spam?

[Anonymous Coward]

So will it scan paper junk mail and move it to my junk mail folder?

Unopened mail may not necessarily be secure today.

[Peter Trepan]

If I were Big Brother, I'd send each piece of mail past an extremely bright lamp, such as a projector lamp, and photograph it from the other side. Reading it would basically be text recognition, but with the added twist that the text to be parsed is overlaid in thirds, with the mailing address superimposed on top. Reading every letter might be beyond the power of even the best text recognition software running on the fastest computers, but the images could be saved until text recognition *is* powerful enough to do that.

Conclusion: Although the system in TFA does none of this, it still wouldn't hurt to assume that snail mail is *not* secure.

Re:Shredding Is Now Easier

[Deagol]

I usually send any junk mail with a postage-paid envelope back to the sender. Just fold, spindle, and mutilate everything to fit it in the envelope, then drop it back in the mail box. Let someone else deal w/ the trash. If you're lucky, you may jam up one of those big mail handling machines at the credit card processing shop. Everything else gets tossed into the wood stove. As much as I like shredding, fire (being old tech) is much less prone to malfunction, and I don't send yet more crap off to the landfill.

NetPost

[Mr. Slippery]

Now if we could only reply the same way.

USPS's NetPost [usps.com] service lets you send letters, cards, and postcards from your browser.

Re:Shredding Is Now Easier

[Mr. Slippery]

That "crap" getting sent off to the landfill is biodegradable paper!

Paper in landfills does not degrade [csun.edu] significantly; newspapers have been dug up after 50 years, still legible.

Please recycle your paper and cardboard. Thanks.

if everyone started taking your suggestion, the post office would waste a *lot* of fuel delivering unnecessary mail around.

The point is that if everyone started doing it, junk mailers would be paying for a lot of return postage, and would perhaps finally have an incentive to send out less junk.