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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2 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.
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