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Comment by dergachev | Hacker News Reader

I've lived in downtown Montreal for the last ten years. For as long as I can remember, they've been doing exactly this with packages. Even if you're home, the mailman will just leave a slip saying that you can pick up your package at the local Canada Post outlet.

I have to wonder whether this will mean a huge boon to mail scanning services like outboxmail.com

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One feature that I like:

If you have a newer community mailbox, smaller packages get left in a larger compartment in the community mailbox and they leave the compartment key in your own mailbox.

After you pick it up, you drop the key in the outbound mail compartment. It's very handy if you're not home to receive packages. In a way, it's like BufferBox.

The larger compartments are barely the size of a regular mailbox here in France though.

So, while I can understand the desire to reduce costs on the part of Canada Post, I thought they offered zero convenience to users.

And going out in the cold and the snow to fetch my mail in winter in a sidewalk-less neighbourhood was really not a pleasant experience (even if they were not very far from our house).

In Canada we have winter weather 6-8 months of the year. We LOVE going out in the cold. We play in the cold. We drink in the cold. We go out naked in the cold (after a hot tub session).

Well, that's not what people say while they're shoveling the snow out of their driveway just after the snow plow filled it with snow from the street, though.

Or when they slip in the slush and ruin their mail when coming back from the community mailbox.

Do you know of a mail scanner service that works in Canada?

Canada Post itself offers one for bills. It's called ePost.

I wouldn't call ePost a mail scanner. It's a service that attempts to collate electronic bills in one place but won't collate payment options and more often than not just redirects you to the service's own website. It requires the support of the company and my opinion is, after briefly testing out the service and having it screw up all sorts of billing info for my accounts, that it's worse than useless.

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