I’m not quite one of those recluses they eventually find living amongst large mounds of unread magazines and other detritus, but it’s close. As more than a few ex-girlfriends could confirm for you, mail – the real, physical kind – was as much or more of a problem for me as email. Which I’m notoriously poor at dealing with. My desk is typically dominated by a shifting sea of mail dunes, making working off of it problematic.
Never particularly diligent about reading mail – let alone responding to it (it’s unclear, but I don’t think I’ve ever successfully RSVP’d to a wedding), the camel collapsed when RedMonk was born and suddenly I was no longer receiving just the deluge due a single “occupant,” but also the direct mail unhelpfully directed towards the address of record for a small business.
Complicating matters further is my peripatetic existence; I divide my time roughly equally – depending on the performance of the Red Sox – between Denver and Maine. Sadly, the USPS has remained lamentably behind the times in more ways than one. While multi-residency is an increasingly viable proposition, what with remote working and so on, our postal service is less than adept at handling this. After setting up forwarding last summer with them, I received a dozen or so pieces at the forwarding address, while the rest were returned to the sender as it had been determined that my apartment was “vacant.” Which was just as fun sorting out as you think it was.
Clearly, between my own failings and those of the postal service, something had to be done. Probably something like real, for pay mail forwarding.
Typically aimed at expats, mail forwarding services essentially exist to provide a US address that will collect your mail on your behalf, and will forward it to you wherever you might find yourself.
Though I am no expat, the solution was precisely what I was looking for: an address that would remain consistent, irrespective of my periodic wanderings. An address, more importantly, that I can retrieve my mail from on the rare occasion that I need the physical copy.
In search of said address, I arrived at Earth Class Mail back in January – and was immediately less than impressed. Because its competitors were far less impressive, however, I was left with few alternatives. And following a nice private note from their Sr. Director of Marketing and a detailed public comment on the blog from their CEO, I decided to give them another shot.
The results? So far, so good. So excellent, even.
Here’s how it works: sign up, and you fill out an obscure postal service form (1583) authorizing Earth Class Mail to receive mail on your behalf. At that point, you now have a functioning address that you can issue to senders (ours can be found on the RedMonk contact page). In my case, I also visited the post office and requested that all personal and business mail addressed to me in Denver be forwarded there. Which, unlike last summer, seems to be working.
If that sounds less than impressive, that because it is. Anyone can receive mail for you: several friends that travel frequently have family members and friends perform this basic service for them. What differentiates Earth Class Mail from you Mom and Dad is what happens when the mail is received.
The exterior of each incoming piece is scanned, and presented to you via the web interface seen above. You have several choices at that point. If the envelope is obviously trash or unimportant, you can have it recycled. A win for the environment, and for you, since it doesn’t pile up on the entrance table in your loft until it’s too high and you have guests coming over so it gets moved to the desk. If it’s one of those irritating mortgage offers, and you’re worried about identity theft, you can choose to shred it. No fuss, no muss.
Assuming that it’s something of import, however, you have other options. If you know that you’ll need it, you can have it shipped to you. If that might not be required, however, you can click scan and the next day a PDF of the mail will be available for download. Discover that it’s a check or something similarly necessary after having it scanned? No worries, you can still ship it.
Many of the people I discuss this with have serious concerns about the privacy of the mail: someone could read your mail, after all, if they’re scanning it. Personally, I haven’t found this to be an issue, because to date it’s been blindingly obvious from the envelope what needs to be shipped, and the items I’ve needed to scan have been uniformly unimportant in the end.
The other major complaint people I’ve spoken with have is the price: our package is ~$70 a month, and each shipment of physical mail is another ~$10. But candidly, this is reassuring to me, because mail forwarding is not a capital unintensive business. Were they charging $10 with free shipments, I’d be constantly worried about their ongoing viability. As for the shipments, it’s $10 per shipment, rather than $10 per item. Ergo, as long as you bulk the shipment as you would, say, an order from Amazon.com, the cost is quite manageable.
Perhaps the greatest advantage of the service, however, is the shortcutting of the time it takes to process incoming payments. The lag time between getting back from a trip, wasing through the mail to discover the check, and sending it out for deposit is essentially cut to zero. Now, I simply drop it Marcia’s mailbox via the web interface and it’s deposited shortly thereafter.
The benefits of the service, for us, are multiple.
- Non-essential mail is intercepted and recycled, shredded, or digitally converted before it has the opportunity to accumulate at the home or office
- Non-essential mail is recycled rather than thrown out
- Junk mail is disposed of securely and quickly
- Mail can be received and actioned even while travelling
- Mail can be redirected to a colleague via a web interface, rather than a trip to the post office
- Mail can be accumulated digitally rather than physically
- Mailing address remains constant in spite of moving, travel, vacation, etc
There’s no other way to put it, my initial impression of Earth Class Mail was wrong. It’s not perfect (and the obscure web UI that borrows heavily from Vista could use some work), but even did I not require the service professionally, I would think long and hard about investing in it personally. Ten bucks a month, the cost of the basic plan, would be a small price to pay for receiving virtually no physical mail.
Now if only I could find a solution that similarly reduced the flow of my email, I’d be all set.
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13 Comments
Great article! One thing you pointed out which ECM tends to gloss over is that it can be prohibitively expensive if you ever need to have any of your mail items physically shipped to you. Unlike other services, ECM won’t use the USPS to forward your mail, insisting instead on using couriers like DHL, UPS, or FedEx. So unless you get enough mail that you can justify shipping it in bulk or unless you’re willing to read everything online, prepare to pay a lot more money each month to have even a handful of letters physically forwarded. In my case, I receive maybe 5 legal documents each month that need to be shipped to me, and I was looking at paying $50/month extra for those shipments unless I was willing to wait until the end of the month and ship them all at once.
Also, I found ECM’s customer service to be somewhat
lacking. I didn’t find out about the $10/shipment thing until I received my first critical piece of mail, and by then, it was too late. I was forced to have that piece of mail shipped, and I immediately canceled my account thereafter. ECM was happy to cancel the account, but they didn’t inform me until the cancellation had been processed that I wouldn’t be receiving a refund for the months I had already paid in advance.
Buyer beware.
I recently came across a blog site called EarthMailFree (earthmailfree.com) that talked a little bit about Earth Class Mail. The guy mentioned another similar service called MyPostalMail. Doesn’t look like they are offering pay services yet, but they seem much less expensive. I tried out their demo. A little basic, but to me, looks much better than ECM’s ugly user interface.
If you choose to discontinue using the Earth Class Mail service, they will ignore a USPS change-of-address form, and will refuse to forward your mail.
Steven,
Thanks for the terrific feedback. We certainly appreciate the praise, and we are defiantly listening to the criticisms! We’ve created a new Community Manager role (that’s me!) to ensure that our Product teams get to hear what the user community has to say, and to do a better job of letting the community know about new features that we’re hard-at-work on delivering.
Earth Class Mail is on the brink of releasing new shipping options that will alleviate most frustrations our users have expressed over shipping costs. Many customers ask why we can’t just slap a stamp on the item that we’ve already received in their behalf and send it their way? The challenge is that US Postal Service regulations prohibit us from doing so. To make sure that we’re in compliance with those regulations, we made some business decisions early on that have us sending items to customers via private carriers.
The good news is that our forthcoming solution will be the next best thing to “slapping a stamp on and forwarding”. It will dramatically lower the cost of forward shipping individual items, for instance those times when you only need that individual document or occasional check.
I also want to mention that thanks to feedback we’ve received in the press, the blogs and from our users (and our own struggles, as we’re all users too!), our engineering and user experience teams have been working diligently to rebuild the user experience of Earth Class Mail. We have learned a wealth of information about how people use and interact with our online postal mail service, and we are translating that feedback into a beta of the new UI, expected to launch sometime in early 2009.
I’d also like to take this opportunity to specifically address some of the comments you’ve received on this post regarding our customer service.
Alan Friedrichsen mentions that the cost of shipping documents seems expensive, and as I mentioned above, we’re working to change that. He goes further to say that he felt that our customer service is somewhat lacking, and I wanted to let your readers know that we’re working on making that experience better for everyone. We’re lucky to have a smart and dedicated Customer Support team that have become veritable experts of USPS regulations that govern Commercial Mail Receiving Agencies (CMRA) like Earth Class Mail.
Alan also expresses dismay over our cancellation and refund policies, and I wanted to let your readers know that we are currently reviewing every bit of communication regarding our policies. We want to make sure that they are clear, transparent and up front. We don’t like surprises and we don’t expect that our customers should feel as though they are getting any either!
“Be Warned” writes that Earth Class Mail is ignoring USPS change of address forms, however we have absolutely nothing to do with the handling nor processing of change of address forms. Generally, it’s executed by the Post Office bearing the Zip code from which you are directing mail away from.
The really important thing to note is that the US Postal Service regulations do not allow anyone to use the US Postal Service change of address form to direct mail away from a CMRA. Earth Class Mail is but just one example of a CMRA, and other include mail forwarding services and private mailbox stores than many of us are familiar with. This is why we try to stress that people getting started with Earth Class Mail SHOULD NOT use a USPS change of address form to have their mail directed to us, especially if there’s even a slight chance that they will need to have their mail redirected somewhere else if the future. We always recommend that you notify your mailers as to the new address to avoid this situation.
Thanks again, and we appreciate the thoughts from you and your readers. Keep ‘em coming!
Nate DiNiro
Community Manager
Earth Class Mail Corp.
Earth Class Mail is for those who travel, live in a trailer, or love to waste money on mail delivery. Don’t get me wrong, it is a great idea, but how many people in the world are actually going to care so much about their mail and the environment? Earth Class Mail doesn’t even focus on the environment, they’re still using new envelopes to scan documents for customers anyways. There are employees there that don’t even care about customer’s mail at all. By the time it is sent out, the mail pieces are bent out of shape, crippled or ripped up. Who would want that? Each mail piece is being man handled multiple times a day until it is requested to get sent out or shredded/recycled. There’s a high percentage that your mail will get lost in the thousand of mail totes, too. Mail totes? What are those? Oh, they’re just tubs that hold up to 50-200 pieces of random letters that are dusty, and sometimes, dead bugs. (It is a warehouse people. Think of the health conditions there as well.) By the way, did I say there were thousands of tubs? Good luck with getting your mail on time, or even getting it at all.
There’s also this machine called the V-Sort. It practically sorts mail into assigned tubs at the end of the run according to the customers wishes. Doesn’t that sound great? Yeah! Except the mail pieces that go through get shredded, jammed, or lost into another tub. Again, good luck.
The only positive I would say about ECM is being able to see your document online. Oh yeah, military retirees aren’t the only ones opening your documents, but anybody who knows how to use a scanner will do the job. So much security for the customer, right? As long as the job gets done, it doesn’t matter who opens a customer’s mail.
Earth Class Mail just more than DOUBLED their prices for existing customers.
I get a modest amount of mail (10-15 pieces per month), and this service now (with all the nice little add on charges, ie. $1.50 if you actually want to be able to see your mail, per piece) costs over FIFTY DOLLARS PER MONTH!!
They don’t care about their customers one bit. What other service have you ever used who will double your per month price, with no warning, and no alternative?
Be ware!!
If you’re thinking of signing up for ECM think twice. My estimated yearly cost went from ~$1000 to ~$4000 due to their recent price increase. I am a business customer who used their check depositing service since it was in beta testing. We constantly contributed bug reports and worked with them to make their service better. This is how they repay their loyal customer of nearly two years? In addition they refuse to assist in forwarding mail elsewhere. If we switch and cancel our service our mail will be HELD at their facility for 6 months at which point it will be marked RETURN TO SENDER and sent back. We will have no way of obtaining this held mail. Our only alternative is to continue paying the new rates until we can send out new marketing material changing our address. So much for one address for the rest of your life…
Check out paperlessmail.com They have been delivering postal mail online since 2001 and do it for less than earthclassmail. Their service is $9.95 per month. PaperlessMail is efficient because the entire mailpiece and contents are scanned and delivered as soon as it is received. When earthclassmail receives the mail they only scan the outside of the mailpiece and then delivery is delayed while you need to tell them what you want them to do with it.
I’ve had an account with Earth Class Mail for about a year now, and have been quite displeased with how they keep raising their prices. Last year, when I signed up, I was able to prepay and get their basic level of service for $9.95/mo, which included something like 15-20 scans per month. Now, a year later, when it comes time to renew, I’ve found that they are charging $19.95/mo for their cheapest plan – which includes NO scans: you have to pay an extra $1.50/scan on top of that already high monthly fee.
I called it quits with them and looked around for another service offering the same features with a more reasonable cost, and found a Michigan-based service called Mailbox Forwarding (http://www.mailboxforwarding.com). They only charge $9.95/mo and include 10 scans, just like Earth Class Mail used to when I first signed up with them. Their service works the same, and I’ve been pleased with the online interface.
I guess the question here is, will you get all of your mail, and will a service every jack the price up on you after they have you hooked? I don’t know the answer to #1, but as to #2, my guess is yes.
ECM almost double its price and so I cancelled my service and am now happy with mailboxforwarding.com.
For canceling you just have to make sure that you continue with ECM for a couple of months till you move all the contact to the new mailboxforwarding address and then cancel the ECM account.
I also like mailboxforwarding.com and they are much cheaper/better than earh class
The problem isn’t so much the service, its that they have you locked in once you sign up because when you cancel the US Postal service will not let them refuse mail for 6 months meaning you can’t do a change of address. This requires you to track down EVERY single person or company that you MIGHT want to get mail from. Sure blame the USPS but they also bury that fact in the fine print.
ECM also made a significant price increase and at the same time removed a notice that reminded you about the cost of each action (scan, shred, etc) saying users found it “annoying”. That is either really bad timing or outright deceit. I tend to believe the latter.
Finally you get a PO Box # but also a ECM member ID. That make about a 20 digit string that you will need to remember. Believe me when I tell you that many online address forms do not properly process this address. It took 3 calls to get Chase Bank to believe that I actually had that address. Ugh.
A generally regrettable foray into what could have been a great service.
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