Working virtually- Manage your postal mail as easy as email with Earth Class Mail
Monday, October 1st, 2007 |One of the biggest problems in small business is mail- I mean regular postal mail. In this age of everything being electronic what is the fuss over regular postal mail. I’ve tried many times to go completely digital and eliminate all regular mail and I have failed every time.
I tried to get rid of my fax machine and only use email to communicate and have failed at that too- have you ever done a real estate transaction? it’s impossible without a fax machine.
Ever work internationally? Except for someone physically going to your mailbox scanning documents and sending them to you whats in your mailbox stays there until you return
A new service called Earth Class Mail hopes to solve many of the pasts failures at making regular mail electronic with a new spin. You take your personal or business address and point all your mail at one of several PO Box locations provided by Earth Class Mail
The service allows any person or small business owner to:
- Open & Scan mail to read it online
- Ship the mail you need to any location
- Recycle unwanted mail with just one click
- Shred mail to protect sensitive information
- Cash checks received
- Get your own Earth-Friendly address - Choose from 19 locations, soon to include 2 street addresses
The company just announced a partnership with Microsoft
“Microsoft also plans to make available an Outlook plug-in that adds a postal service logo to the interface for guaranteed secure sending of documents. “Post offices are excited about the prospect of an Outlook plug-in and integration with the major Web mail vendors,” says Maxim Lesur, Worldwide Postal Industry managing director at Microsoft.”
This is a great service but with anything new caution must be used before blindly sending all mail to this service
The service only has addresses in 19 locations this could be a problem if there is no address in your state or city. The service only uses PO Boxes currently which can be a problem for certain vendors and for receiving packages or other odd shaped postal mail.
Using a PO Box for a company email might not give customers or vendors the right impression about your business.
I liken this service to email- you can have multiple email addresses assigning an email address to certain functions i.e orders@youremail.com for all orders, etc
You likely have an established address for your small business which you likely will not dispose of - use this service to redirect portions of mail that you know you can send to a PO Box potentially in another state.
If you are going to be out of state or out of the country for more than a few weeks have the post office forward all your mail to this service then stop this when you return.
Pricing is not what I would categorize as cheap- it’s more than $10 a month and the price goes up depending how much mail you get and the other services you have performed but its all about convenience and being able to receive and respond to your mail wherever you are. Think about how much it costs to try and handle something when your out of town or can’t get to your mail box and approaching a deadline
I’m sure the service will improve over time and offer many more features- for early adopters I recommend a little due diligence
Tags: Scottsdale 360, Earth Class Mail
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