Slashdot Mirror
Snail Mail As E-Mail
techcon writes "An Australian startup Planetwide has launched an interesting product called Scan Me. The idea is simple, you redirect your snail mail to them and they scan your physical mail and email it all to you as a text searchable PDF. Targeted at the world wide traveller, it also looks like a good way to help prevent identity theft and getting nasty white powder in the mail."
How would this stop identity theft. Unless you use TLS/SSL email is less secure than snail mail -- its not traveling across bare network wires.
When a new bill arrives, I get an email and I can view the scan of the bill online through the paytrust website. I can pay the bill automatically, if I choose, by establishing per-payee rules (always pay bill [foo] as long as it is under [y] dollars) and that sort of thing.
At the end of the year they send me a CD-ROM that contains all that year's bills and payments for my archives, allowing me to store everything in a much more space efficient way than I'd have with paper files.
It's a great service, although I don't know that I would find much benefit if they started handling all my mail and not just my bills. Mail I get is either bills, junk, or physical things which I wouldn't want in scanned form.
I don't now about you, but my version of Adobe Acrobat Reader has this newfangled "print" feature.
The unofficial
I visit your house at least once a year anyway. I promise not to read the letters.
I don't like the idea of someone reading my personal snail mail. I'm sure they get a laugh out of finding out "Mr Jones" subscribes to Busty Babes monthly etc.
My other sig is crap too
Don't most services that require bills offer some type of electronic payments? Wouldn't scanning your bills just be more work than going to their website and paying it that way?
I am over here... now I am back over here!
Doesn't sound so great to me. A lot of things that come in the mail are sent that way *because* they have to reach you physically - a new credit card, etc.
what i really need is the other way around. I send them the email, they print it out and snail mail it for me.
The Belgian Official Mail services were planning to do the opposite. Printing emails and delivering it to for ex. elderly people. That way evrybody has email, even if you do not have internet available.
-> More Tolerance Is Less Extremism <-
you mean ill actually have to print out the pizza hut coupons before using them, pfft never mind then
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
so are all of their employees bonded? this seems like a perfect way to commit fraud to the nth degree.
also, how the hell do they deal w/ things like bills where there are a zillion leaflets of various sizes etc.? from experience, this *can* be a very labor intensive task (meaning = costly).
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
yeah, having some low wage working opening all my mail then emailing it is a good way to steal people's ID's
With a bill presentment service you can pay everything from a single site using a single consistent interface and login. I've been using PayTrust for about a year now and I couldn't live without it.
Interesting concept, but even discounting the obvious security and privacy concerns, what types of correspondance would this be useful for?
Aside from a few (not yet online) bills, the only physical correspondence I receive are things I value for their very physicality -- personal letters, packages, magazines.
I also get junk mail. But as it is seldom addressed specifically to me, I wouldn't think this service would have much of an impact on that... Automated junk mail to spam converter, anyone?
UK Royal Mail has offered this as a service for some years now.
The summary doesn't mention it, but not only do they scan everything you get, they forward it to you once you're somewhere you can receive it, so you still have the paper originals. And for those who are paranoid about having confidential documents sent via E-mail, they let you cut the scanning step out and just treat it as an ordinary forwarding address.
It doesn't say anything about whether they're offering this to people outside of Australia, but it's certainly interesting for those of us who move frequently. I wonder if this will start a "permanent postal address hosting" service genre like Hotmail did with E-mail.
I think I'm dealing with it fairly well. Not trying to be a jerk, but I seriously never thought of it as that much of a problem. Different strokes for different folks I guess. :)
I am over here... now I am back over here!
Yes, it would "convert", if you will, to the original printed form.
I have a nice simple Q for ya,
Think of all the spam you get...
and picture getting that in your REAL mailbox...
and sorting through that for your bills and such...
**shudder**
Well, relying on the merchant still excludes all the smaller bills that you probably have to pay. My water bill is a little local company with no website, for instance. Plus the benefit to recordkeeping is tangible. The service runs about ten bucks a month, which I find reasonable.
Naturally it all depends on how many bills you get and how often you travel, I suppose.
This service lets you send an email, and have it converted to a snail mail letter and sent to someone. So if you combined the two services, you could send an email which would be converted to snail mail, then the recipient could convert the snail mail to an email that they could read from any computer in the world.
Oh wait...
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
Then for subscription only members you can view an archive of the best (or worst) peices of mail that they've scanned in. Hell, I'd pay to see that.
Oh yeah, cant wait to get my tax return check in PDF. Try explaining that one to the bank teller
...Honest!
Or better yet how about my ATM/Credit card?
Do you take plastic?
VISA, MasterCard, Discover and Amex
Great -- Hands over printed card
Awkward Pause (tm)
Yeah, I had to print it since it came in my email...
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Targeted at the worldwide traveler, it also looks like a good way to help prevent identity theft
Are you mad? You mean having someone else read your mail and then send it in a searchable format over the Internet is a good way to prevent identity theft? Is today opposite day?
I don't want them forwarding me a scan of my monthly Playboy. Hmm on second thoughts :)
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Hrm, it seems to me that such a system would only work for 'normal/average' snail mails. Letters, etc. I wouldn't want stuff like bank PIN codes, important work information, etc going there. Or mails where they actually provide you with something physically useful in the letter, such as a return envelope.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Very disappointed with seller's timeliness. Will NOT do business with again, and do NOT recommend.
Wait .. but what about paychecks and business reply mail which have watermarks and special teeny tiny envelopes, respectively? What about THEM!?
- http://pakman.sytes.net/
There's just a little something that you get from actual mail, especially hand-written mail. True, it's terribly archaic, but when you're far, far away, a letter is one of the nicest things to receive someone willing to spend a buck and some time. Maybe it's just the amount of time invested in handwriting, or the lack thereof when typing an email, but the physical presence of personal mail is something people should not, in my opinion, be so eager to discard.
That being said, business mail, provided it is sent via secure trasnmissions, seems perfectly suited for movement towards digitalization. The businesses themselves, though, should take more initiative to move themselves away from the massive and expensive paper usages and try billing electronically. I can only imagine the vast amounts of paper used by banks every month for high-speed printed glossy credit card applications.
Losers choose to abuse the use of "loose".
When is this company having its IPO? This company is thinking outside the box to leverage synergies between the electronic and physical worlds. Its stock will have tremendous upside potential, and I would like to get in on the ground floor. It is companies such as this that will bring the new electronic media into the twenty-first century.
...can it smuggle drugs?
Personally, I like to have my corporation in a different country from where I live, which, of course is a different country from where I keep my bank account. My web servers are in an entirely different country as well. Having my mail sent to a fourth, or is that fifth, country could further impede copyright owners from every suing by business...which is to distribute copyrighted materials for free via P2P!!!!!
For many years now I have been suspecting that the dreaded white powder would indeed arrive at my home, thus killing me and ruining my perfectly legitimate home cocaine business. Its comforting to know that I will not have to face the situation where somebody opens my mail and robs me of my privacy. Oh wait.. ohh.. oh crap!
getting nasty white powder in the mail :(
I wish I got cocaine in the mail
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
-
It's worth noting, perhaps, that in the early days of the Internet, it was proposed that the U. S. Post Office manage e-mail. Electronic messages would come to your local post office and then be delivered to you along with the regular mail. The proposal was not considered for very long.
No, not only was it considered, it was actually implemented and deployed. It was called E-COM, and it operated from 1982 to 1985.And it was really dumb.
The USPS put in a system with a mainframe computer and "high-speed" printers in major regional post offices. Mailers could submit mail jobs as IBM remote job entry jobs over dedicated SNA links. The interface was so one-way that error messages came back as paper mail a day or two later.
E-COM was for first class mail, sent in bulk. You had to send at least 200 letters to a single regional post office in a day, so it was useless for general business mail. It cost as much as first class mail, so it was useless for advertising. Mailers couldn't have a return envelope included, so it was useless for bills. Western Union did establish an extra-cost consolidation and routing service, so you sent your mail to them and they routed the messages and batched up jobs for the USPS. But few people signed up.
an AOL disk looks like.
KFG
How will it help identity theft? You are now sending all your mail to a third party, and anyone there can make a copy of hundreds of identities.
That's the crappiest busines plan I've ever heard. It doesn't even have a ????? Profit in it.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Now your mail will be "securely" saved in a server, where it will be intercepted by Carnivore and can be provided to anyone with a subpoena, etc.
What a great idea!
it also looks like a good way to help prevent identity theft and getting nasty white powder in the mail.
Some people I know would be more than happy receiving white powder in the mail.
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
As long as you trust their staff, not to abuse your privacy.
Wow. In the United States there are federal laws protecting both the content and *addresses* for all mail sent through the US Postal Service. If Big Brother wants to watch you there are oversight requirements (ie. the watcher must be watched) for the simple act of scanning the addresses on an envleope. The requirements are more stringent if BB wants to actually open your letter and read its contents. I don't remember off hand at what point it takes a Judge to sign off on it, I'd have to look it up.
If you're using this "Scan Me" service, however, they can intercept your mail once it leaves US Postal Service channels with much lower levels of scrutiny - they'd just need to walk up and ask the nice people at Planetwide to do their civic duty. In fact, if Carnivore is still running (and I'm paranoid enough to believe it might be) then they wouldn't need to contact the Planetwide staff at all. The Feds could just go to Planetwide's ISP and monitor the traffic, reading the information unencrypted as it flies by on the 'Net.
The ACLU can't protect your civil liberties if you are asking third parties to copy all of your private correspondence into the electronic equivalent of postcards. No, scratch that, postcards are still covered by the same Federal laws as normal (sealed) mail. This is copying to postacrds and re-routing through a network of untrusted private couriers. =[
Travel the Galaxy! Meet fascinating life forms...
In 1996 when I had to travel in order to take Oracle7 classes, my company's owner would send me packing in my own car with gas and food money only. When I would arrive at the hotel (having driven from Louisville KY to say, *Framingham MA* (a hellacious drive of 20 hours) I would call him at the office (often late at night) and he would fax an image of his credit card straight to the hotel desk: blown up to 8.5"x11" size. They always accepted it.
The Finnish Post has agreement with most of the companies that send bills to people:
your bill originally arrives in pdf format,
you receive an email notification,
you read the bill on the post's secure website,
you might even pay it right there.
No paper involved at all.
Yea, like this is really going to work. And how much is it going to cost me to have them forward each rebate check I get, not to mention what it cost for them to scan it in the first place? Think spam was expensive before? Wait until you pay for scanning all the junk mail that you get in snail mail, or all the crap packed in with your bills. Say goodbye to ever getting a magazine subscription. No free samples in the mail any more, and no cookies from Mom at Christmas time. And I'm paying for this why? Because I fear identity theft? So that then they can e-mail my private mail to me as clear text? So that an unknown number of people at that company I know nothing about all see all of my mail?
Face it, the always-on-the-go world traveler who just might (but I think it unlikely) get anything out of this has other means to deal with it: a personal assistant, express shipments that can catch up to the next hotel he will be at, faxes for some documents, he doesn't need an outside company poking through his business. The average smuck (like most of us) wants that mail, and knows that some of it needs to be dealt with on a timely basis (If someone sends me tickets, for example, I want them before the event, not a week after), and that some of it will get "lost" if an outside company is opening it and going through it.
Bad idea. Oh, also, the company will be out of business in six months.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
This is a stupid idea. You can't guarantee that the workers for the company will not try to steal your identity and use your information. Like what other people have mentioned, your info now has the ability to be stolen in huge numbers now. People who throw their bills and important info w/o shredding them thoroughly just get what they deserve.
.smell my feet.
My mom could finally send me a completely fat-free chocolate bunny for Easter! ;)
Doing my level best to piss off the religious right wing...
snail mail telling me about your wicked screensaver.
Besides which, the scan process still has to send to the originals to you somewhere - if that place is secure why not send the stuff there in the first place. When I'm overseas I far prefer to have the relatives open anything questionable/official and advise me/handle it themselves.
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
Waive your rights concerning the secrecy of letters, let them spy on you much easier and PAY FOR IT!
Maybe the underfunded intelligence agencies can use this business model to raise even more money. At the same time they save money and manpower, because they no longer need to sniff around in your waste... What a wonderful idea !
5) Columbia House CD of the Month Club selection
4) Beer of the Month Club selection
3) Oh...look - shiny!
2) Cookies? What cookies?
1) Congratulations! You're the Publisher's Clearinghouse winner!
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Yeah - The other way around, I would get so much waste paper I could run a decent-sized power generator with it. Time to post on USENET! Goodbye power bills!
this has onother big advantage, pdf does not have freaky scripting and other very stuppid "welcome to virus" crap and thus gives the system admin the time to actually inprove the network in stead of hunting down infected pc's
When I first read the subject line I thought it was going to be related to RFC 1149 "A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers", which can be used to send your email using an archaic form of postal service (although not really snail mail I guess).
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
This service scans in mail that redirect to their location - and emails it to you... Not just a simple mail redirection (i.e. send the snail-mail intended for my old address to my new address)
Or you could just buy Abby FineReader and scan your mails yourself.
What would do it for me is if the scanner companies brought out cheap, multi-sheet feeder scanners.
Powered by onion juice.
Ok let me see, some dude who hasn't been vetted gets to open my mail and stick in a scanner.
Hmm I wonder how much it would take for me to bribe the people there to get personal info from the documents, couple of hundred AUS$ a month??
Small digital camera, or pencil and paper, or perhaps one of those spectacle camera's I keep getted spammed about is all it will take.
I wonder sort of security precautions these people take, you are after all giving them quite a level of trust with your presonal info.
End of rant... I like your suggestion and we did have that when I lived in oz (lockable mailboxes for the block of flats).
Better not send money over snail-mail then.
In the UK this works great:
I just have my bank create a bill payment option for each of my credit cards, my electricity bill and also for settling debts with my roommates - then on *their* banking application i just click bill payment and choose the amount.
Of course you can get one better with direct debit whereby i authorize my cellphone and satelite providers just to take their funds straight from my account.
Unlike my (limited) experience in the USA, this actually works out cheaper. I get a GBP2 discount on each cellphone bill because the provider knows that they'll get their money every month on the day taht they want.. and they dont have to pay people to open mail and deposit checks.
This is one area where the US is behind, far behind.
The concept of Snail Mail bills and account info is painfully outdated. I'm sure some crypto-geek expert could come up with a way that these folks could just E-mail me my data and be safe about it!
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
How is this different from the sysadmins at thousands of companies who already have access to all your personal details, mailing address, credit card details, etc? What about password files in databases with hundreds of thousands of passwords and peoples mother's maiden name. With that info you can access someones bank details over the phone and possibly even transfer money. Every day all your personal information is out there in someones hands.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
No need to do without that nasty white powder:
They can attach the latest Outlook virus to their mails as the binary equivalent of anthrax powder.
Enjoy,
ix
What security? If they scan my mail, they have to open it. If they open it, they can read it. Why should I trust these folks?
And what about all those times when the recipient really needs hardcopy, not email.
Besides, if I'm in, say, the UK, how long is it going to take for my mail to get to Australia?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
For all the people who get a turn on knowing their mails are read by others..
is newspeak.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
...do they filter out junk mail? If I forward my postal mail to them, I don't want to end up getting the same subscription letter to Cosmo every 2 months in my email. And most likely if its sent by the service, there will be little to no chance of filtering out, especially letters aren't scanned to text.
Seeing as the main thing to be emailed onto me would be bank statements and bills, it would probably be wise to switch providers to ones that allow you to do it online.
The only other time I can imagine I'd need snail mail is if my grandparents wanted to write to me. I've been trying to introduce them to the internet but they're not intrested.
jesus, pretty soon we'll have other people drive to work for us, for fear of being car jacked...
life = risks. There's no need to let paranoia eat away at your brain cells.
Here's a concept: Read your own dam mail, keep what's important and shred the rest. Gee, that was hard.
Is the juice worth the sqeeze?
As a service, New Zealand Post, the major National Postal service will scan all your mail, collate and archive the Paper and deliver only the electronic version (PDF, TIFF) to you by email or CD every day. They can intercept mail that meets specific criteria (Forms, etc).
Less paper actually makes it to your office
The weathers here - Wish you were beautiful
No you don't. Talk to your bank. Mine (Washington Mutual) is capable of paying ANY bill that I receive through a single, consistent interface and login.
Why the hell would I waste money on something like this or PayTrust when my bank does it for free?
Yeah but you brits get crappy cell phone and utility rates. For example, my cell only costs me $45/month for unlimited usage. That's right, I could speak 24/7 for the entire month and still only pay $45.
I feel lost. What is the point of your sig? Is it just to have a piece of expressive C code, just to be hard core? Or is there some kind of a glitch in the code? Am I missing something? Your sig does serve a useful function, though; it reminds me to quit spending soo much time on slash and start hacking.
Could this be a way for europeans to get US credit cards (if a service was used in the US like this Australian one)? I know a lot of mac users wish they had a US Credit card to use iTunes, among other things. Also, the USPS seems to be hurting due to electronic mail. What if they offered a service like this for a premium. They surely would have some takers. And they would just need to buy some big automated scanners and a bit of online infrastructure. Sounds like they would be the best candidates for the job seeming they are the hub. Reduce ID theft en route that way.
Short answer: The Sig is an example for the extremely bad programming practice of Microsoft. Detailed explanation: The company is well-known to hire talented, but ignorant people that are capable but not knowledgeable to create lots of code. The Sig is an example where a very important function is implemented in a way that is perfectly resource-harming and insecure. This type of memory-leaking and resource-waste is one of the reasons for the continued great instability of Microsoft code.
And yeah, if you're in the UK obviously you'd be stupid to redirect all your mail to Australia, which is why they specifically say that their service is only available for Australia...
As for security, of course they can read it. If they do, and do something with the information, they would quickly go out of business - wait and see whether they develop a good reputation if you're worried.
Presumably a company making a living of this will be careful about who they hire. So the reduction in risk of identity theft would be from having a small set of strangers who rely on their customers trust to make money open your mail instead of some strangers who happen to be a criminal intent on stealing everything you've got going on a rampage through your mailbox every now and again.
Do you mean.. you email them, and they send a letter for you? I think the Royal Mail tried that a while back, I don't know what happened to it.
Slashdot at a threshold of -1.
/dev/null coming, Taco?
So how is the routing of all packets from *.aol.com to
"When I was young, we would look for white powder in envelopes."
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
Banks tend to be reluctant to reverse or block bogus transactions. It's good to have a middleman involved to keep your money safe.
Did I just say that?
Sounds good as long as I can add filters so my junk mail doesn't get turned into spam.
I could not get any information from Royal Mail's current website though. Anyone ever tried those services?
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
I wish they had this service in Canada -- I had to return in 2002 (though I still use PayTrust for U.S. originated bills).
You could've hired me.
There's no reason for a sender to use this service and then ask it to mail hardcopy to the recipient. Just use the mail in the first place.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I have been receiving bills like this for around 3 years. Every bill I receive is scanned and I can view them online. It has been a great boon as a consultant as I don't have a pile of [overdue] bills waiting for me when I get home. Plus I can run reports and see exactly when something was paid and how much was spent.
Since it scans the entire bill I am able to view detailed information. Such as, I can view natural gas and electric usuage and see if that new furnace and air conditioning unit are actually paying off one year later (something I did about a month ago.) Sure you can keeps years of paperwork in a box, but that's not searchable.
I receive 100% of my bills in this manner. I will never go back!
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Lois, this isn't my Batman glass. - Peter
For me personally, I don't see the benefit. The cost of forwarding all of my mail to Australia is prohibitive (as I live in the continental USA) and time-consuming - I could not use this for anything timely (like bills). To be honest, there is really no other snail mail that I get that would be worth archiving, as most of it is advertisements, credit offers, and other meaningless solicitations. Although, how does this service handle magazine subscriptions???
No, of course not. It sneaks up on you while you're asleep, looking for warm blood... That sounds like a Stephen King plot. The shredder is loose. Is it in the closet? Is it in the bathroom? Oh no! RUN! RUN!
Title: Shredder Moon
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Actually, Citibank has (had?) a system for storing all of your various logins and viewing all of your accounts on one page. The URL is myciti.com
They could pack hundreds of times more V-mail in a container than standard post. When just about every ship crossing the sea was needed for the war effort, this was a Good Thing.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I have seen a BBC story on the reverse of this, in India you can e-mail someone who has no internet access ... it gets printed out and snail-mailed to the recipient.
Seems to work well....
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
Targeted at the world wide traveller, it also looks like a good way to help prevent identity theft and getting nasty white powder in the mail."
Ok. Which item below is lesser or smaller than the risk of getting "nasty white powder in the mail":
a) A kernel hacker's desire for personal cleamliness
b) Microsoft's concern for your security
c) Natalie Portman's petrified grits
d) Having a piano drop on your head as you walk down the sidewalk
e) None
Answer: E.
This kind of FUD (essentially: prevent the risk of getting anthrax in the mail!) should be reserved for AV companies.
Please.
Maybe the service would be convenient. Maybe it would be uber geeky, but I submit that it reduces your risk of contracting anthrax through the mail from effectively zero to zero. Run a little risk-reward on that. I think that your money would be better spent on a tin foil hat (tm), as that would be a more effective way to reduce your risks from a variety of sources, such as mind control waves from outer space.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
Would you really trust some mail scanning temp with something like this?
"Dear Ben, I hope J Lo never finds out about our wonderful evening together after we left the strip club. It was wonderful.
-- Candy"
On a serious note, banks send PIN numbers via the mail. Not sure I'd want that being posted on a website.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
And how would it "prevent (...) getting nasty white powder in the mail." Such a method does not prevent social engineering, which is still one of the most efficient ways for doing nasty things.
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
In the UK I have been doing this for more than 5 years.
I have not set foot in a bank in the UK since I arrived here.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Between me and my wife we have four credit cards, three bank accounts, two cell phones, a gas bill, a cable bill, a power bill, a mortgage, two car bills, & five magazine subscriptions . . . all right to my inbox. And while I still take the hard copies of the mags all the rest of that stuff never gets printed. The rest of my mail is junk and everything from work is VPNable. All of this is free and identity theft safe from simple thieves stealing from my mailbox.
And I will gladly slit a language fascist's weasand from ear to ear, quoting "Thou remnant!" the while...
[cough...never mind]
but anyway... since I have lived here in Australia for 16 years, I have got used to a fairly healthy situation where British spellings and pronunciations are preferred, but Americanisms accepted where the context or word is appropriate.
Instead of emailing the scanned PDF, they should send you notification that a new document is available via email, and make you sign in to their server using https (or maybe require a client-side certificate) to retrieve it. Problem solved.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
'nuff said.
...you get Anthrax? (or maybe the less dangerous VBS/Anthrax?)
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
...or, that could be the most clever variation of the 419 scams to date !!!! Imagine this business going online and playing by the rules for several months, enough to build a customers base, then one day rip them all off by transfering funds to some bank account number in the Caiman Islands, or by funding a terrorists organization of some sort.
I pay for nearly everything (except, perhaps coffee) with a credit card, and all my services except for my electricity send me an e-mail telling me my bill is available for perusal on their website. At which point I peruse it, then tell the bank to pay it on the due date. Any cash I need or checks I need to deposit involve the ATM. I have to write about 1 check per year - very unusual circumstances, and *never* see the inside of a bank.
The average smuck (like most of us) wants...
I really hope that this was a clever reference to Ishtar. Otherwise, it's "schmuck", you schmuck.
I buy books from Amazon.com sometimes. I would love to have them scanned and e-mailed to me.
I don't know how many people use it, but in Canada there's a service offered by Canada Post that does something like this. You log into an https site and securely view and pay bills that are aggregated from various companies. The companies themselves interface with epost (in a secure manner, I'm assuming), so this is actually far more secure than having someone scan in mail manually.
Also, it's free (I'm assuming the various companies pay for it, since they'll no longer have to pay the costs of paper mail)
epost.ca
Yeah but my phone works in just about every country on the planet save north korea.
:)
And i pay about $25/month for the few calls that i actually do make.
Electricity seems to cost about the same in the UK and US, though we get substantail off peak discounts if we use it for heating and such.
There certainly aren't quite as good all you can use cell tarrifs in the uk, but bear in mind that we dont ever pay a thing for incoming calls (unless we're abroad), oh and there are very few places in the UK that dont have coverage with all 4 2nd generation networks.
3G coverage is still a bit spotty but, remind me again, what 3G options do you have in the states
Snail mail and PDF suck. The world traveller can get a webmail account and you can tell anyone who matters don't snail mail. Let the post office eat that junk mail that will not stop.
Don't invest in this nonsense. You wanna kiss your money good-bye, just give the money to the unemployed.
I've been looking for a way to outsource my anthrax problem. Now I've found it!
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
So could I just mail myself all the long boring documents I don't have room to store in my office?
I agree it's useful to receive your bills online - many utility companies in the UK allow you to do this already. But really, what's the point of printing them out, then scanning them back in again so you can read them online? That seems incredibly backwards - the wrong solution to the problem. It starts on a computer and ends on a computer, so cut out the middle piece of paper and save the trees... uhh... man!
Organic free-range music... yum!
No Bills (A paper trail doesn't vanish - online bills can)
Just take a screeenshot and save it. I always do this for payment confirmation pages. Linux users can also print to file. The resulting PostScript file can be printed, gzipped, or converted to PDF for Winusers. Windows users can install a color Postscript printer driver (HP Color LaserJet works fine), set it for Print-to-File and create PostScript files which can be viewed/printed using the no-cost Win32 version of GhostView.
If I get a confirmation email message, I save that too.
Any of these files can be burned to CD for archiving. Support for PostScript, PDF, JPEG, and PNG should be around for as long as you'll need to look at these payment records.
I'd like it better if the vendor's system generated a digitally signed email message, but I save what they send anyway.
Yes, but tech support says that I need special hardware to print. I shouldn't have to spend money on some "printer" thing. I bought a computer, now YOU MAKE IT WORK!
"it also looks like a good way to help prevent identity theft and getting nasty white powder in the mail."
Are we really so blinded by fear in this country that Joe American is afraid he'll be targeted with an envelope of anthrax? Jeez!
Look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology; Ain't got time to make no apology
or :
"Hail, Metternich !".
And we all thought the stupidity of the "dot-com" era was dead! I'm heading back to day-trading!! See you all in Bermuda!!!!
Think of all the money I can save! I can just email a PDF of my bill/money to my creditors!
V-Mail
2 a_vmail .html
In order to conserve cargo space/weight, England
and the US military used "V-Mail" for letter
communication between soldiers and their families
during World War II.
There was a specified V-Mail form that letters
were to be written on. The form would get copied
onto microfilm, and it was the microfilm that was
sent overseas (not the paper form). When it reached the end point, it
was blown back up into letter form and delivered
to the recipient.
Some info here:
http://www.postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibits/2d
http://www.deadmedia.org/notes/49/496.html
-mrv
So if you're a *Flix subscriber, does this mean that Planetwide will receive the DVDs, Divx them and email them to you???
I'd pay money for that....
Why not? these HP inkjets are getting better and better all the time....
Two issues need to be handled with the scan-n-forward service like this.
1) As previously mentioned physical items such as Credit Cards, checks, or medicine. Having them send them to you a month could cause them to be too late (repercussions vary from annoyance to dead).
2) Copyright issues. That magizine you have is protected by law (in most countries) by copyright laws. Does the scanning break the law?
3) Those &#&*@# credit card applications and other junk mail. Like I need another avenue for more spam.
A/C
I would love to receive the various monthly statements and other junk I receive in the mail in electronic form instead of in paper form. This way I could just dump it all in a directory without looking at it too closely. It's such a chore to go through all of the paper and determine if I need to save anything, and it has advertisements in every possible place they can stick one.
For my credit card, I pay the bills online, and I can view my balance and whole transaction history online. When I called them asking if they could stop sending the paper statement every month, they told me yes, but they would have to charge me money for it!
but what about the issues of playboy?
And couldn't ever get anyone to say that it'd be legal to do in the states (open and scan someone else's mail) without major legal paperwork. Just receiving their mail to hold and forward (as a commercial mail receiving agent) requires a notarized form. I still think it'd be a killer app. Especially if you can remotely select mail to be destroyed, stored, or bulk-forwarded by UPS.
I'd like to see a service where they have a postal address and every piece of snail mail sent to that address goes into a landfill, like a physical /dev/null. Then I would put that address on as many snail-mail spam lists (Columbia House, Heritage Foundation, etc.) as possible. They would 3) profit! selling the paper for recycling.
Why bother with this? There are plenty of ways to get postal mail forwarded, from long before there were computers...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Let me get this straight...........I mail my mail to these guys so they can scan it and email it somewhere else for me. Woohoo, time and money saver!! That's kind of like mowing my neighrbors lawn so I can pay him to mow mine?????