Reading Your Postal Mail Online 173
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.
wait till NetFlix hears about this! (Score:5, Funny)
This is very cool! But I'm not sure what NetFlix and Blockbuster (among others) are going to think about this! Finally, an easy way to get DVD's onto my computer!
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Wow, that check looked nice... Sure wish I could deposit it electronically.
They probably have something to allow you to get a desired item forwarded to you and not shredded, it's probably mentioned in TFA if I weren't to lazy to read it.
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Mail is so Web 1.0 (Score:2)
Only thing I use the USPS for anymore is Netflix, Taxes, and the sundry documents associated with being a good citizen like jury summons, election packets, etc. I write about four checks per year, and haven't gotten on in the mail in years.
Mail is so 1999. Although I could see this being useful for people who are sailing aroud the world or deployed in the military, and aren't fortunate enough to have someone to volunteer to serve as their mail drop.
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Tampering is. Handling, i.e. processing someone's mail on their behalf and with their permission isn't. I remember way back when there were these people employed in normal offices called secretaries who used to do that for managers. And - get this - they were mostly chicks!
Base theft? They are all belong to us anyway!
Seriously, I think you
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Chicks are good at opening other people's mail anyway. Just ask your mother or your wife - "oh sorry I opened it I thought it was for me...". Never heard THAT one before...
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Doubleplusgood! (Score:5, Insightful)
Snail mail is the ONLY private form of communications we have left.
Re:Doubleplusgood! (Score:4, Insightful)
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And as long as they keep destroying or losing my letters, or as long as they remain in Hefty trashbags stacked around Newman's living room, they will remain private.
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Re:Doubleplusgood! (Score:5, Insightful)
Until of course someone steals your mail, reads through it all, and steals your identity. But hey, at least it keeps the crystal meth users [msn.com] busy. If someone wants to steal your mail, they'll find a way.
Also, Doubleplusgood? How do you equate the police of the Ministry of Love reading messages specifically looking for "crimes" against Big Brother, with automated document scanning by a private company that you hire? There are plenty of times when 1984 references are on target, but this doesn't seem to be one of them.....
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Unless you are deemed "suspicious." It's a Brave New World.
KFG
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Brave new world my ass. (Score:3, Insightful)
Want to be really scared? Go re-read Huxley's book and realize that the world he describes would be quite welcomed by a majority in many countries today.
"Brave New World" has lost its shock factor, and "1984" isn't nearly paranoid or intrusive enough.
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For example, cognitive dissonance is what happens when some creationists confront evo
Re:Doubleplusgood! (Score:5, Interesting)
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(makes fist and clenches teeth)
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I've actually had to call the Postal police (or whatever you call them) because either the postman was not delivering the mail or throwing it away. Of course I live in a major city, but my room mate found that a credit card she ordered had been tried in an ATM about 50 miles away so obviously something happened to the mail being delivered.
I'm not sure what be
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Many people replied to say how stupid that is, so I'll skip that part. If you want private communication, exchange private keys with your correspondents and encrypt your electronic mail. That's the only private form of communications you have and it's not "left", it's a fairly recent one.
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Or, you could do it with public and avoid looking like a moron.
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Does anybody have tinfoil hat instructions (Score:5, Insightful)
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Maybe that "something" is the apparent potential for abuse?
...or is it that it requires complete trust in a mechanical system?
We must consider that, being a mechanical system, it will have failures.
Ergo... we must put complete trust in the system's technicians.
Would that trust be appreciated by the technician that "goofs", performs a C.Y.A. and makes your critical check/legal-document/other-correspondence disappear completely?
Count me out.
Re:Does anybody have tinfoil hat instructions (Score:4, Insightful)
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Sorry, but that's irrelevant. Those employees are bound directly by Federal Law to deliver the mail to you, un-opened.
We trust the folks at USPS, and the UPS store (et al) to handle mail, not open and scan it. To me, that's a HUGE difference when you're talking privacy and secure correspondence.
If there's a better example for your comparison, it would be payment-processing facilities. (a.k.a. lockboxes [wikipedia.org])
Their operations are strictly controlled, managed and audited, yet heavily automated with mail-openi
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Yeah, the instructions are simple: Don't sign up.
Are you really hurting that much for Karma that you have to pander to the tinfoil hat crowd?
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It's not like the USPS is putting this out there and mandating that we all use it. Instead, stupid people are paying someone else to do it for them. I'm not sure why you are concerning yourself with stupid people who are willing to pay for something pointless.
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Not at all pointless for people who have temporarily or permanently left the USA. Mail delivery to many countries is unreliable and slow. Being able to see important things right away would be tremendously useful.
I have to rely on trusted people to receive my mail, use their judgment to sort the useful stuff from the spam, and deal with everything intelligently. I would much rather take the bur
It's the privacy problem (Score:3, Insightful)
If your mail is anything like mine, you get lots of credit card offers - or even in rare cases, actual credit cards - that you did not ask for. I trust my wife to sift through all this crap and properly dispose of it, but would I trust employees at some company like this to do the same? Nope. Sure, someone can raid your mailbox, but that's different than consistently passing all the stuff through the hands of a low paid employee at a 3rd party company.
Excellent (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Excellent (Score:5, Insightful)
-dave
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I suspected you were being facetious with th
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Sort chronologically, sort alphabetically, sort by tag, keyword search, text search... it's all good stuff. Unless of course you have a filing cabinet which can search documents for you, in which case I'd be interested in buying one.
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check out paytrust... (Score:3, Interesting)
Shredding Is Now Easier (Score:5, Interesting)
Congrats: You slashdotted fellowes.com (Score:2)
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but if everyone started taking your suggestion, the post office would waste a *lot* of fuel delivering unnecessary mail around
Actually what's more likely is that the people sending out junk mail would likely be a lot more selective in who they send out junk mail too.
As far as the environmental thing is concerned, if that's your only concern in life you should probbably just shoot yourself in the middle of a forrest full of hungry bears. You'll quickly be re-cycled and won't contribute to any further useage
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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.
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
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I remember reading a story on
I re
There's some sort of loop involved... (Score:4, Funny)
How do you mean "reply" ? (Score:2)
Dollar bills (Score:1)
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Checks? (Score:2)
Don't find that very appealing.
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It's not like they remove your ability to have mail sent to your house or anything. The service is that they give you a new address to which you can have things shipped. So if you have checks or original documents, you can give them your home/business address, but if you have other mail you just want to be able to read/archive/shred, you give this other address, and then you can access your mail from anywhere.
Reply online too! (Score:3, Interesting)
You can, with USPS's (US Postal Service) NetPost service [usps.com]
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Is that the "USPS Simulator" where they have an ingenious algorithm to ensure that 30% of the emails never make it, and that the typical delivery time to the destination inbox averages 5.5 days? And, of course, no delivery ever occurs on Sundays or during any one of 78 other designated Federal and/or other postal holidays during the year?
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But.... (Score:2, Informative)
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Who is opening and scanning the mail? Automated machines?
Meat based machines.
How do I know they don't read my mail?
Your life isn't that interesting.
How do we know that they don't lose any mail?
How do you know USPS didn't lose any mail?
Also wouldn't there be an additional delay before I get my mail (wait to be scanned and then wait to be delivered to you physically)?
If you wanted all your mail delivered physically, then don't use this service. The idea is that you'll get mail electronically and the majority of items won't need to be sent physically at any point.
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Humans, I imagine. I think you are missing the point of this service -- it is not necessarily designed to make your mail more secure (although that depends on security of your home address - personally I'd rather take my chances with
Extra services (Score:5, Funny)
For another $5 we can break up with your scary ex for you.
And for an extra $10 a month we can forward your up coming invitation to visit Iraq from your Uncle Sam to an address in Canada.
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I'm in favor (Score:3, Funny)
Do they have a form of penalty system if your mail blows-up the shredder?
Non-letter contents (Score:5, Funny)
If my gf sends me panties, will someone sniff it for me?
When the brother of the ex-president of Nigeria sends me his check, will they PayPal it to me?
See, unless it does all the things I use my snail mail for, it's useless to me.
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And why did I want this ? (Score:5, Insightful)
More seriously, I can see that this might appeal to people who travel a lot, but for everyone else ?
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I think it would be useful to somebody who has a P.O. Box, and doesn't want to go down to the post office to pick up their mail. That way, it could be even more private, since they won't have to be seen opening their box.
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Other variations have been around a while. (Score:3, Insightful)
This sort of service-economy stuff is popping up in lots of little corners. If you're an office-less operation (say, a consulting group that work from the road or from your home[s]), it's pretty appealing. But yes, you've got to really trust all the players. But it does (gaa!) help you to "concentrate on your core competancies," assuming that dealing with the physical paperwork of billpaying isn't one of them.
Swiss Equivalent (Score:2)
I think I trust the Swiss post office a lot more than a private US company in terms of privacy, but to be honest, being able to check your mail on a website is way more practical than getting a bunch of PDFs -- I'm thinking about using this while I'm spending 3 months travelling around South America next year and don't relish the thought about grabbing
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Mail-In Rebates Industry (Score:2)
If not, it's a huge opportunity for them.
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Missing the Point (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course for things like junk mail I'd much prefer it not be sent at all, but I'm happy to take the junk if it means being able to hold an occasional letter from an old friend or family member. To read it scanned on a screen would seem so wrong.
Oh my goodness, the fine print (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.remotecontrolmail.com/pricing.php [remotecontrolmail.com]
Gotta learn all about mail induction, flats, storage days, document prep fees charged by the minute but billed by the second, the assumption that eveyr piece of mail weighs a minimum of one ounce for shredding-weight-per-day calculations.
omfg
Thanks but I'll wait til I can figure out if this will cost $20 or $200 per month since I have no control over my inbound mail.
Is it just me... (Score:2)
Just think of all the things you get in the mail that have sensitive information:
Correspondance with the IRS
Your debit/credit cards
PIN numbers come by mail
Health records
X-rays
Test results (both school and health related)
Bills with your account numbers and buying habits
I'm not subscribing to this...
Unopened mail may not necessarily be secure today. (Score:3, Interesting)
Conclusion: Although the system in TFA does none of this, it still wouldn't hurt to assume that snail mail is *not* secure.
no big deal (Score:2)
People are willing to pay for this? (Score:2, Informative)
NetPost (Score:2, Interesting)
USPS's NetPost [usps.com] service lets you send letters, cards, and postcards from your browser.
Anyone use paymybills.com? (Score:2)
I want a robot to bring in my mail ... (Score:2)
Interesting (Score:2)
certified email (Score:2)
I'd like the target person to get an email saying he has an email to retrieve, go to the usps site to retrieve the message, have the option to save the message or delete, and have the sender get an email saying the message has been read.
The key is something the courts would accept.
Awesome! (Score:2)
Other options (Score:2)
Great...someone got VC (Score:2)
In 2001 I proposed it again to several different groups, unfortunatley for me the timing was bad and it was right after the Anthrax scare, I was seen as being opportunistic even though my meetings had been scheduled before well in advance.........DOH !...well I cant say Why didnt I think of this......I friggin DID !
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Talk about inefficiency! (Score:2)
Combine this with... (Score:2)
...a web to paper mail gateway so that I could type and sign letters (with a previously uploaded signature file) without actually having to touch a piece of paper... oh man.
Bonus points if it embosses the signature.
Triple word score if it sends the letter certified / registered mail for you.
Wet dream alert if they offer a service where they'll act as an unbiased third party that will let you prove that you sent someone a letter stating X on date Y confirmed received on date XXXX.
Oh fucking shit if s
Big market for... (Score:2)
Security/privacy of postal mail (Score:2)
more spam (Score:2)
Old news in Europe (Score:3, Informative)
I've been doing this for 6 or 7 years (Score:2)
An added benefit is that they sort through and toss all your junk mail that you would normally get addressed to you.
Check out paytrust.com.
Easy solution (Score:2)
Okay, just have all your legitimate mail sent to RCM and buy a big red "DECEASED, RETURN TO SENDER" rubber stamp for all the rest.
Or keep a hungry ferret in your mail box, that works for me.