Reading Your Postal Mail Online

An anonymous reader writes "Remote Control Mail gives us one more reason not to leave our computers. Their service lets you access your postal mail on the Web. They offer scanning of mail contents, shredding, recycling and shipping. There's a good writeup on Techcrunch, complete with a CAD animation showing some robotics technology (Flash Movie) that RCM is developing to automate mail handling. The service costs $25 to get started and $20 a month for individuals." Now if we could only reply the same way.

Comments

wait till NetFlix hears about this!

[yagu]

This is very cool! But I'm not sure what NetFlix and Blockbuster (among others) are going to think about this! Finally, an easy way to get DVD's onto my computer!

Re:wait till NetFlix hears about this!

[Bastard of Subhumani]

if this isn't a government sanctioned facility, is mail tampering still a federal crime

Tampering is. Handling, i.e. processing someone's mail on their behalf and with their permission isn't. I remember way back when there were these people employed in normal offices called secretaries who used to do that for managers. And - get this - they were mostly chicks!

would the risk/reward of ID theft be worth the lower penalty of base theft.

Base theft? They are all belong to us anyway!

Seriously, I think your foil hat's a bit too tight.

Re:wait till NetFlix hears about this!

[Dunbal]

secretaries who used to do that for managers. And - get this - they were mostly chicks!

      Chicks are good at opening other people's mail anyway. Just ask your mother or your wife - "oh sorry I opened it I thought it was for me...". Never heard THAT one before...

Doubleplusgood!

[pair-a-noyd]

And we all know that our mail contents will be kept 100% private.

Snail mail is the ONLY private form of communications we have left.

Re:Doubleplusgood!

[Broken scope]

You think they don't open letters sometimes?

Re:Doubleplusgood!

[krell]

"Snail mail is the ONLY private form of communications we have left."

And as long as they keep destroying or losing my letters, or as long as they remain in Hefty trashbags stacked around Newman's living room, they will remain private.

Re:Doubleplusgood!

[NiteShaed]

Snail mail is the ONLY private form of communications we have left.

Until of course someone steals your mail, reads through it all, and steals your identity. But hey, at least it keeps the crystal meth users busy. If someone wants to steal your mail, they'll find a way.

Also, Doubleplusgood? How do you equate the police of the Ministry of Love reading messages specifically looking for "crimes" against Big Brother, with automated document scanning by a private company that you hire? There are plenty of times when 1984 references are on target, but this doesn't seem to be one of them.....

Re:Doubleplusgood!

[kfg]

Snail mail is the ONLY private form of communications we have left.

Unless you are deemed "suspicious." It's a Brave New World.

KFG

Re:Doubleplusgood!

[Josh Lindenmuth]

Snail mail would be private if it got to the desired recipient 100% of the time. About 1/2 of my mail ends up in a neighbor's mailbox (and vice versa). I can't tell you how many times I've had an important bill (such as property tax) delivered by a neighbor who accidentally received it. Every time we call the post office, they ask us to file a report (which we do), but nothing changes. Luckily we live in a pretty trustworthy neighborhood, or I'd be in trouble.

Re:Doubleplusgood!

[Firehed]

That explains the spam for CH32P S0M4.

Does anybody have tinfoil hat instructions

[HolyCrapSCOsux]

Normally I'm not a super-huge privacy advocate, but something about this makes me a bit uncomfortable.

Re:Does anybody have tinfoil hat instructions

[kevin_conaway]

Normally I'm not a super-huge privacy advocate, but something about this makes me a bit uncomfortable.

Yeah, the instructions are simple: Don't sign up.

Are you really hurting that much for Karma that you have to pander to the tinfoil hat crowd?

Re:Does anybody have tinfoil hat instructions

[HairyCanary]

Errr... all of your postal mail is already routinely handled not only mechanically, but by real live people.

Re:Does anybody have tinfoil hat instructions

[Duggeek]

Sorry, but that's irrelevant. Those employees are bound directly by Federal Law to deliver the mail to you, un-opened.

We trust the folks at USPS, and the UPS store (et al) to handle mail, not open and scan it. To me, that's a HUGE difference when you're talking privacy and secure correspondence.

If there's a better example for your comparison, it would be payment-processing facilities. (a.k.a. lockboxes)

Their operations are strictly controlled, managed and audited, yet heavily automated with mail-opening and scanning devcies. Employees and contractors are often bonded for the sheer volume of currency they are apt to handle. OTOH, there's so much labor-intensive work that it's hard for such operations to turn a profit. Many organizations, especially cable-service providers and land-line telephone services, consider it a necessary evil, even though the entire department often shows quarterly losses.

Despite all that, it only affects how your intended payment reaches the proper account; the model being proposed in TFA is a method to disseminate all of your incoming, private mail. Currently, we don't really have a model to compare; unless you're a butler.

If a lockbox struggles to show a profit, just how would this business model work anyway?

Excellent

[sitturat]

Hopefully this idea will prompt the companies that still send out bills by post to reconsider this pointless waste of money/paper/time. Then this service will eventually become redundant, but will have served its purpose.

Re:Excellent

[planetmn]

With few exceptions (Taxes are the only thing that comes to mind), I can get all of my statements paper free. This includes Credit Card, Cable, Phone, Gas, Electricity. In fact, they would prefer (and push) the electronic methods of receiving your bill. Some people (me included) just prefer paper bills. An easy to store and reference method of your account history.

-dave

Re:Excellent

[Lumpy]

The only thing that will solve that is someone going and physically beating the crap out of the executives and Finance departments at these companies. Here in Michigan several of the utilities CHARGE EXTRA for you to pay electronically. Yes, the payment method that is cheaper for them costs you more! There are 3 companies I still send a check in the mail for them to have someone physically handle,open and input the payment instead of having it 100% electronic and therefore cost less.

Re:Excellent

[Mister Whirly]

Which is all fine and dandy until your hard drive dies. On tax day. And yeah, you can scream "backup" all you want, but I can tell you now it is easier to walk over to my filing cabinet than it is to rebuild a system, put an OS on it, and restore the backup. Besides, all my paper bills take up far less space than my computer, monitor, scanner, and printer. Unfortunately computers are cumbersome, require storage space, and most of the time you don't ever look at them except possibly while surfing porn.

Re:Excellent

[kkwst2]

You paper bills take up less space? OK, so you're 22? Or perhaps you're using hardware built in the 1980's? Regarding backup, I actually use FolderShare to distribute my important files (encrypted transfer) to several computers including my laptop. All my Money files, Taxcut returns, important scanned receipts, etc. are shared between a few computers. All these files, including my digital pictures, are around 12 gig. So for the cost of around 50 gig, I have quadruple redundancy of important files. I also manually back up to an external drive occasionally. But one computer crashing won't really affect me in the short-term, as I always have three backups. Later, I just do a clean install and then restore important files. As for the porn comment, I guess you are 22! ;)

Shredding Is Now Easier

[hondo77]

I bought a new shredder a few months back (thanks for the bargain, eBay). It's powerful enough to shred the whole envelope and its contents without opening, even with those fake credit cards inside. Junk mail management is now so much easier.

Re:Shredding Is Now Easier

[Deagol]

I usually send any junk mail with a postage-paid envelope back to the sender. Just fold, spindle, and mutilate everything to fit it in the envelope, then drop it back in the mail box. Let someone else deal w/ the trash. If you're lucky, you may jam up one of those big mail handling machines at the credit card processing shop. Everything else gets tossed into the wood stove. As much as I like shredding, fire (being old tech) is much less prone to malfunction, and I don't send yet more crap off to the landfill.

Re:Shredding Is Now Easier

[Mr. Slippery]

That "crap" getting sent off to the landfill is biodegradable paper!

Paper in landfills does not degrade significantly; newspapers have been dug up after 50 years, still legible.

Please recycle your paper and cardboard. Thanks.

if everyone started taking your suggestion, the post office would waste a *lot* of fuel delivering unnecessary mail around.

The point is that if everyone started doing it, junk mailers would be paying for a lot of return postage, and would perhaps finally have an incentive to send out less junk.

There's some sort of loop involved...

[krell]

There's some sort of pointless loop involved if all I use this service for is to read my paper-mailed ISP and "Remote Control Mail" bills online. A veritable Mobius-strip of "what the hell FOR???!?!?".

Reply online too!

[tedhiltonhead]

> Now if we could only reply the same way.

You can, with USPS's (US Postal Service) NetPost service

But....

[KeepQuiet]

Who is opening and scanning the mail? Automated machines? How do I know they don't read my mail? How do we know that they don't lose any mail? Also wouldn't there be an additional delay before I get my mail (wait to be scanned and then wait to be delivered to you physically)?

Extra services

[edwardpickman]

For an extra $3 a month we can tell your creditors to bite you.

For another $5 we can break up with your scary ex for you.

And for an extra $10 a month we can forward your up coming invitation to visit Iraq from your Uncle Sam to an address in Canada.

I'm in favor

[Hennell]

I think this is a brilliant idea. I'll be perfectly safe from all those angry letter bombs I'm sent...

Do they have a form of penalty system if your mail blows-up the shredder?

check out paytrust...

[pw700z]

http://www.paytrust.com/ - They receive your bills, open them, post them online, and allow you to pay them. It's awesome... i've moved 4 times since i started using the service, and only had to notify the gas/electric company!

Non-letter contents

[identity0]

But if someone mails me anthrax, will they convert it to a Outlook macro for me?

If my gf sends me panties, will someone sniff it for me?

When the brother of the ex-president of Nigeria sends me his check, will they PayPal it to me?

See, unless it does all the things I use my snail mail for, it's useless to me.

And why did I want this ?

[richg74]

Let's see. When I get postal mail now, I:

1. Get it from the mail box
2. Open it
3. Read it

With this service, I would:

1. Get it from the server
2. Open it
3. Read it
4. Pay $20 per month

BRILLIANT ! Where do I sign?

More seriously, I can see that this might appeal to people who travel a lot, but for everyone else ?

Other variations have been around a while.

[ScentCone]

An interesting example is Anybill.com, which runs a service handling accounts payable for you. Basically, you have your company's invoices sent to their postal address, and they open them and do some data entry and document scanning. You get e-mail whenever stuff lands there, and surf to their web app to review and authorize payment of the bills (some of which get paid electronically, some by having checks sent out on your behalf, as appropriate).

This sort of service-economy stuff is popping up in lots of little corners. If you're an office-less operation (say, a consulting group that work from the road or from your home[s]), it's pretty appealing. But yes, you've got to really trust all the players. But it does (gaa!) help you to "concentrate on your core competancies," assuming that dealing with the physical paperwork of billpaying isn't one of them.

Missing the Point

[prichardson]

One of the great things about snail mail for me is the physicality. For personal letters nothing beats having something that your correspondent spent time with.

Of course for things like junk mail I'd much prefer it not be sent at all, but I'm happy to take the junk if it means being able to hold an occasional letter from an old friend or family member. To read it scanned on a screen would seem so wrong.

Oh my goodness, the fine print

[jyoull]

um, it might LOOK like $20 a month, but keep reading. The price schedule has ten dense footnotes!

http://www.remotecontrolmail.com/pricing.php

Gotta learn all about mail induction, flats, storage days, document prep fees charged by the minute but billed by the second, the assumption that eveyr piece of mail weighs a minimum of one ounce for shredding-weight-per-day calculations.

omfg

Thanks but I'll wait til I can figure out if this will cost $20 or $200 per month since I have no control over my inbound mail.

Unopened mail may not necessarily be secure today.

[Peter Trepan]

If I were Big Brother, I'd send each piece of mail past an extremely bright lamp, such as a projector lamp, and photograph it from the other side. Reading it would basically be text recognition, but with the added twist that the text to be parsed is overlaid in thirds, with the mailing address superimposed on top. Reading every letter might be beyond the power of even the best text recognition software running on the fastest computers, but the images could be saved until text recognition *is* powerful enough to do that.

Conclusion: Although the system in TFA does none of this, it still wouldn't hurt to assume that snail mail is *not* secure.

It's the privacy problem

[gr8_phk]

... something about this makes me a bit uncomfortable.

If your mail is anything like mine, you get lots of credit card offers - or even in rare cases, actual credit cards - that you did not ask for. I trust my wife to sift through all this crap and properly dispose of it, but would I trust employees at some company like this to do the same? Nope. Sure, someone can raid your mailbox, but that's different than consistently passing all the stuff through the hands of a low paid employee at a 3rd party company.

People are willing to pay for this?

[ironicsky]

I don't know about that... Up here in Canada(For those of you who don't know its that place north of you) our postal system has been doing that for years. We call it http://www.epost.ca They will put all of our bills and registered mail online for us so they dont come to our house. They'll even do pay check stubs online. The only thing they won't do is personal mail.

NetPost

[Mr. Slippery]

Now if we could only reply the same way.

USPS's NetPost service lets you send letters, cards, and postcards from your browser.

Brave new world my ass.

[CFD339]

It is neither brave nor new. It is the same old tyranny of wealthy cowards relying on fear mongering for personal and corporate gain.

Want to be really scared? Go re-read Huxley's book and realize that the world he describes would be quite welcomed by a majority in many countries today.

"Brave New World" has lost its shock factor, and "1984" isn't nearly paranoid or intrusive enough.

Old news in Europe

[carvalhao]

In Portugal, where I live, this service is already provided by the postal office... for free!