I have everything electronic that I can. However, some stuff still comes paper – gov forms, checks, even a few statements (where the company won’t do electronic – ARGH!). All of my historical stuff is scanned/shredded, so anything new is either shredded or scanned/shredded. I’m all digital.

So here’s my thoughts:

1. I usually get mail that is around 3 weeks old, as is;
2. I spend, maybe, 4 hours a month scanning and shredding stuff when it arrives;
3. ECM is $60 cheaper than my current mailbox (mid-tiered price) and will do #2 for me;
4. ECM will deposit my checks (saving me time).

To answer a question way above…Why do I use a PO Box?

1. When I’ve moved, I didn’t have to update my record with tons of companies;
2. When I go on vacation, they hold my mail or forward to me elsewhere;
3. They receive all my boxes instead of leaving it next to my front door;
4. They only charge me postage to mail me my stuff;

So, with ECM, I’m not sure if I am losing any additional turnaround time due to shipping everything to Oregon. Due to my circumstances, it may be about the same or a couple days longer.

All in all, if this new service saves me 4 hours a month in sorting/scanning/shredding, that’s 48 hours a year – more than a work week. That’s valuable.

Possible Downsides:

1. I don’t like the extra long PO number w/ ECM;
2. I’m sure I can think of others.

Possible Upsides (off the top of my head):

1. OCR and document management add-on
2. Web 2.0 integrations
3. ECM to Fax integration (fax me my mail)

Thoughts:

1. Snail mail will be around for a long time;

2. This may be a no-brainer for mailbox renters like me (how many are there?);

3. Selling non-PO box users may not work;

4. The check cashing function could be great.

Only Wells Fargo for now? No prob. I don’t have an account, but opening one is really easy. You can sweep funds from your WF account to your BOA/CITI/CHASE/ETC account as often as you please. There may be an autosweep option, too. I think WF works with Quickbooks for you super automation freaks.

Final Words –

1. I have no relation to ECM. I am came here because I was looking for reviews.

2. I wrote this post because so many people have the wrong idea and attitude.

3. When congress was shown the telegraph, they laughed saying “who needs to send information that fast? We can drive a truck full of mail between DC and NY in a day.

4. No one is going to pay a premium to have their mail delivered overnight. If this isn’t familiar, google the FedEx thesis paper (got an F).

5. I expect to get physical mail for years to come. I try to be all digital, but not everyone in the public and private sector are on board yet. If I can pay a simple fee to have my off-line data put online…Fantastic.

I’m signing up for the free trial and having my regular PO box forward my stuff to them. I doubt if I will remember (or bother) to put a followup here in a month, so good luck everyone.

I’ve been working with this company for almost a year and a half now, and I love the concept so much. Our customers also love the concept as well. Thank you for the attention and support.

Ummm… that is not the truth at all. I’m sure there are vets in the mix, but not ALL of their employees are vets. Sorry bud.

zman@netapp.com. Take care

Rick Z.

Regards,
Rick Z.

The fact is most people can’t afford Neiman Marcus, Business class seats, and other high end stuff put the people who do surely make up for it.

The fact is; MOST people won’t want to part with $10 a month for someone else to manage their mail.

Do the math: it takes the “average” person no more than 10 mins a day to organize (remember you still have to “deal” with the mail – pay the bill, reply, etc, regardless of the service). Some days people will only have flyers to recycle and it takes 5 mins. So we are talking about $1 per min for 10 min so for most people you are paying a service $60 an hour to “organize” your mail.

Not a good value proposition for most people.

Best of luck with your plans.

Our technology is all about giving mail recipients *choice* in how each piece of their mail is handled. When we receive new mail we image front and back, in hi-res color, and present it to our customer on the web. From there the user clicks to choose whether something is to be open-and-scanned, recycled, shredded, forward-shipped, transferred to someone else, or archived. Shortly we’ll be adding a feature to deposit checks found in the envelope directly into their own bank account at their own bank. We *don’t* open and scan every piece of mail – only those items which we are instructed to scan. This ability to cache the physical mail until a choice is made by the customer is what makes us absolutely unique in the world (no European post office offers this service or anything like it, contrary to the other commentator).

Let me clarify our employment policy. When your confidential documents sit at a mortgage company or a law firm or hospital, practically any employee can get access to them. The last paralegal to turn the lights out at the end of the day can rifle through any file cabinet. 90% of information theft occurs by employees who have access. Those employees do not go through anything like the security screening that ours are required to. We start with veterans (usually disabled – this is part of our corporate commitment) who previously held DOD clearances in the past (DOD clearances are invalid after they leave the military) because it’s a good starting point… but we repeatedly conduct our own civilian equivalents of those clearance checks every six months, and then add things like credit check and other background screens. They are bonded and insured. They sign very robust non-disclosure agreements. They are very closely monitored by supervisors and by the software running on their workstations. I assure you that the $8/hr clerk behind the counter at MailBoxesEtc did not have any such screening, and neither did the many thousands of temp employees of the USPS hired during the holiday rush.

More importantly, all scanning is performed in a “clean room” environment. The employees wear special pocketless uniforms, like casino workers. They cannot carry any personal items into the clean room – no cell phone, no pencil and paper, no USB drive – nothing to record with. They are in an isolated work cell – one worker at a time, one open piece of mail at a time. There isn’t even a phone or picture of the family on their desks. So even if they could notice a social security number in the process of scanning a document they’d have no way of recording it. Everything they do is under surveillance. In the near future we’ll be introducing a feature called Documentary(tm) which will allow our customers to view their own documents being scanned. In your business would your employees agree to wear pocketless uniforms instead of their nice clothes, and sit in front of a camera all day not speaking with any other co-workers? Not very likely.

Any mail that is so confidential that a customer would not want even us to open it can of course be forwarded, still originally-sealed, to the customer.

You say that the service “adds costs” but you do not explain how this is so. Perhaps you haven’t considered the true costs of renting a MailBoxesEtc box (much more than our entire bundled service plan costs) and that of driving cost and the value of your time to drive there. Or for a London-based company to have to have an office and admin in NY just to receive mail in NY when they could instead just use our address, a VoIP phone and a website, efax and email to fully serve New York clientele remotely. If you’re talking about enterprise we slash a massive amount of cost out of the entire paper life cycle by converting paper – expensive to push and store – into electronic form, before it ever has the chance to clutter the company premises. See our website for more information on cost savings if you’re so inclined, but like I said to Mike, if it is “expensive,” then compared to what, exactly?

Contrary to Mike’s choice of title for his article on us, we are not out to “kill snail mail.” NI bet you’d be surprised to know that every year postal mail volume in this country grows by 3 billion pieces. People have been predicting it will “go away” since the invention of the word processor, yet look inside your mailbox.o one and no thing – not even email – has put a dent in postal mail volume yet. The average person only gets more mail every year, not less. Our service allows customers to cut that back, and recycle 100% of mail they discard (the national average is about 20%), and shred – with a mouse click – what might otherwise be stolen by an identity thief.

The key thing to keep in mind is that we did not design this service for every person and business out there. Our target market is big enough will all the baby boomers (multiple homes, RVs, boats, airplanes), deployed military, road warrior consultants, hollywood crews, energy workers, expats, foreign based companies, large enterprises and government agencies we serve, to give but a small sample of our customer base. 15% of American households get their mail in a USPS PO Box… that alone is a huge market to serve, and we have virtually no competition going after it because of the immense technology that is required to make this entire process scalable. Our competition is in the form of more expensive and inconvenient alternatives which are in use today. When our target customers learn about us they often comment “wish you guys invented this ten years ago – but i’m thankful you finally did!” We’re happy with that… we don’t need Earth Class Mail to be used by every person on the planet to become a $1B company.

Thanks for listening. -Ron

Has anyone actually used the service here, & could make a recommendation one way or another?