This service is competely dishonest in their promotions and do not deliver. Plus it’s $10+ to forward a SINGLE envelope.

Earth Class Mail is awful.

I’m an expat from NYC living in Asia. I am probably an ideal target customer for Earth Class Mail since I still have all my accounts in the US open and pay various bills there, etc. However one big concern I have is about their sustainability. What happens if you use their service and they go out of business? Suddenly this “life-time” address of yours has to be changed? Also, I don’t know how much the cost is worth it given I pay all my bills electronically and receive all my account statements electronically as well. Right now I use my parent’s address in NY as my US mailing address and when I go back there once every 3 or 4 months I pick up a box of all my mail. 99.9% of it is still junk-mail or non-junk but still useless mail (e.g. hard copies of things I was notified of electronically, etc). The last time I went home the only important piece of mail was a letter from the IRS about a problem on my tax return. That actually arrived while I was there in NY, if I wasn’t there though my parents would have told me about it and forwarded it to me in Asia. They know a letter from the IRS is probably important.

I mention all of this because I know tons of other expats and everyone does something similar - i.e. has family in the States that get their mail or use their US office to get their mail. You can’t overlook that. I have personal packages sent to my firm’s office in NY all the time and they forward it to me - all “free”. Earth Class Mail has a good service in that they would forward the packages to you overseas but there is of course a significant charge for that. A typical professional who works overseas or away from their home for long periods has many mail services that their office will simply take care of for them as part of their normal mail operations.

So so far I haven’t found any compelling reason to use Earth Class Mail. I suppose if I was more comfortable with them not going out of business and the prices were a little cheaper I’d use it, but right now it doesn’t seem worth it. I think the trend is that instead of snail mail needing to be digitized we are seeing companies just sending things electronically in the first place. Most everything else is just junk mail.

Indeed we did have many problems with our hosted VoIP phone system provider. As a matter of fact that company just recently notified us that they are exiting the retail business and we will thus be on a new in-house system before the end of February. I apologize for your poor experiences with our phone system - it frustrates us just as much as it does you, if not more - but your headline belongs to Premier Voice, not to Earth Class Mail! Unfortunately switching multi-site phone system vendors is not an overnight affair; we gave them several chances to fix their system as they promised, only for them to give up and leave the business… these things happen. I’m sure they cost us a few customers and at least (this) one black eye on a blog.

You might also find interesting that Earth Class Mail was singularly selected to be the subject of the first ever documentary television series of its kind, "Start-up Junkies," which has just begun airing on HD Cable channel MOJO. If you don’t have HD cable you can see the first few of the eight epiisodes here: http://www.mojohd.com/mojoseries/startupjunkies. The cameras followed us for a year to document what it is like launching a business that will be as big as FedEx or Google, from the early days.

I’m really glad that you recognize the many positive aspects of what we have built in the Earth Class Mail service. Indeed, we hear every day from customers how "cool" they think it is and it motivates us to continue our global expansion and help as many people solve their long-standing mail issues as we possibly scan. We’re now opening retail storefronts throughout North America to provide local street address and customer support in major cities like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washiington, D.C., etc. We’ve been interviewed in major media, from CNBC to BBC, because of how revolutionary our service is - the recognition that we are doing for postal mail what cell phones did for telephone calls. It’s very gratifying to see the world "catching on" to the value of what we’ve built.

Lastly, on the issue of credit card fraud check systems, again I apoligize that your experience with our system was frustrating. We are constantly trying to find ways of minimizing credit card rejections from the bank network without dropping the bar too low on actual attempted fraud (which is unfortunately rampant on the internet). Our customer service team is available during extended hours and is incredibly helpful and friendly - especially with credit card authorization issues… please give them a call on our new toll-free # 866-625-MAIL if you experience any further difficulties. And may the phone gods actually let you connect this time!

Cheers,
Ron Wiener, CEO
Earth Class Mail Corp.