The truth about Posten's service... (Score 2, Informative)

I am very familiar with Posten's service, as I work for NETdelivery, one of the vendors that provided the technology used to implement this system.

The primary purpose for this service is to enable its users to receive, view, and pay their bills in a secure online environment from one trusted location. In addition, patrons of this service can subscribe and opt in to content offerings they are interested in receiving, such as online magazines, newsletters, and marketing offers for which they have expressed an interest.

Posten has paid a great deal of attention to preventing spam in its system by limiting access to mass mailing capabilities to only companies who have paid to participate. Once the companies have paid to participate, they can only send content to their current snail-mail customers or customers who subscribe through the service. Those customers must then enter a subscription key to begin receiving the content.

Canada Post is also offering a similar service using NETdelivery's technology, and it is being well received by its patrons.

Personally, I would be thrilled if the US Postal service would provide such an offering so I could receive and pay my bills online from the one trusted service provider. The only options that are currently available require me to have my bills snail mailed to the provider where they scan the bill (and really, who knows who has access to the paper version of the bill) and present it to me online. I'd also love it because I could eliminate all that paper that goes to the recycle bin, and even limit the information that I see by choosing not to subscribe to it.