Update: If you read this, you might also be interested in my three month review of the service, which can be found here.
The idea behind Earth Class Mail, as somebody said today, is a damned cool one. Much as Grand Central promises one phone number, so does Earth Class Mail promise one physical address. And for those that already have that, other nice-to-haves such as junk mail filtering, automated recycling, package receipt, and digital mail scanning. If your mailbox looks anything like mine, it’s probably worth it simply for the reduction in clutter alone.
For someone in my situation, however, it’s no longer a nice to have, but a business necessity. Forget the fact that I spend half the year away from home, it’s a problem simply with my existing travel schedule. Mail that arrives after my mailbox is full is not held, put into one of the lock boxes they have for oversized packages, or even shoved under my door: it’s marked returned to sender. Just as convenient as it sounds; I’m still fielding calls from companies asking whether or not they have the correct address. As you’ll see in a moment. Even my alma mater can’t find me. Apparently they had some mail returned and - I’m not defending this decision - reverted to my address in Southie. As I haven’t lived there in better than 5 years, that was unsurprisingly returned as well.
Oh and yes, I am spending an increasing amount of time away from home.
Earth Class Mail, then, is not a luxury but a business and personal necessity. Or, more accurately, a business like it. Because my initial experience with the firm, related on Twitter, was not a positive one. First, they rejected my credit card, and you’re not going to believe why: AMEX denied the charge because a statement they mailed had been returned as undeliverable. I’m absolutely serious, that happened.
Now obviously that’s nothing to blame Earth Class Mail for. But when I tried once more to complete the transaction, the system returned an error saying that there was a duplicate charge, try a different card. While I suppose it’s a positive that they monitor for duplicate transactions to avoid double charging a customer, I had no intention of using a different card. So I tried the toll free number (800-530-6229) and received a message saying the number had been disconnected. Same thing five minutes later.
Still, such things happen - we once had the DNS record for redmonk.com placed in limbo for 2 days, so I can sympathize. Therefore I looked up a direct line, called, and got an IVR. One level in, it clicked twice and hung up on me. Either event, by itself, would not be a big deal. But both together aren’t good.
So here’s the question: is Earth Class Mail the firm their press makes them out to be, or are they the next Webvan? As Rafe Needleman notes, it’s not exactly a low capital business.
Unfortunately, it’s a business - unlike WebVan - that I really need. I’ve emailed the sales rep that contacted me after I applied for a free one month coupon, and we’ll see what they have to say. But in the meantime, if you have any experience with them or know anyone over there, I’d appreciate any information you can provide.
If their competitors were competitive, they’d already have my business. But if you Google mail forwarding, you’ll see that my options are actually fairly limited. Bongo, suggested by a commenter previously, is probably the best of the rest, but is feature poor in comparison and more geared towards pure international forwarding.
Popularity: 4% [?]
5 Comments
Have you heard from them ?
Whatever you do, please don’t put us in the same category as Webvan. Earth Class Mail has been around for four years. We recently closed a $13.3M venture capital round led by the largest and most respected fund in the Pacific Northwest (Ignition). We have a strategic partnership with Microsoft and are one of the lucky few adopted into their global Startup Accelerator Program (our platform is built on .NET now in order to support millions of simultaneous users). We serve customers ranging from individuals to small businesses to a Fortune 50 company to military and government employees - accessing their mail from over 130 countries now. We’re solid as a rock and expanding rapidly, but based on sound business fundamentals and meeting an extraordinarily large unserved need - as you noted, far ahead of any yet-to-appear competition. What we do is not as capital-intensive as you might imagine because we spent 2.5 years developing innovative material handling automation systems that allowed us to scale this business so cost-effectively that no one else will (hopefully) be able to catch up with us. This has also allowed us to keep lowering our prices to $9.95 per month (less than efax!).
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.
I have been looking at an international alternative, http://www.privatebox.co.nz seem to be doing a very good job.
I’ve been very curious about this service ever since I watched the documentary about them starting up which I downloaded from iTunes.
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.
Earth Class Mail promises a lot and delivers very little. They took my mail receipt time from 3 days to 3 weeks. The check cashing they promote all over thier site is ONLY with 1 bank and ONLY if you have a premium account.
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.
One Trackback/Pingback
Post a Comment