Swiss Post scans your snail mail and sends it to you via email. | Hacker News Reader

Swiss Post scans your snail mail and sends it to you via email.

post.ch

70 pointsmattverick52 comments

For what it's worth, for anyone interested, I used this service for years, and they're great.

Really nice if you're nomadic and want to have a steady mailing address.

In the U.S., https://www.earthclassmail.com/ provides the same service. I think it is (or was) Earth Class Mail's backend software that is/was powering Swiss Post Box, when I was using it.

Also great for having a U.S. mailing address for your business, if needed.

You can use either of these as the billing address for all your credit cards, bank statements, tax returns, etc.

I use a similar service for here in the UK.

http://www.ukpostbox.com/

So far no problems.

Any problems with earthclassmail? I've heard from people who love them and people who have had problems with them.

I used them for 2-3 years, and wouldn't say I ever had any problems, but left after they upped prices with little advance notice. Especially when you're only stateside once a year or so, it becomes tricky to change providers. There are several similar services these days and some of the smaller players can be a better fit, depending on your mail volume and exact needs as far as scanning and forward shipping. I've been pretty happy with virtualpostmail the past few years now.

Are there any that are more targeted towards low volume "regular" consumers? (aka: cheaper)

@martianpenguin, your comments are dead. Only a small subset of users can see them.

You can reach out to pg@ to request an unban (http://www.andrewkkirk.com/2012/12/how-unbanned-from-hacker-...). Hopefully enough traffic will make hn reconsider this policy.

I would say virtualpostmail - the starter plan is $5/month. I'm pretty low volume - I really only receive replacement credit cards when the old ones expire, plus the all important IRS correspondance (why I can't communicate with them 100% electronically baffles me!)

I've used them for a few years. No problems at all.

No problems with earthclassmail here either. It is expensive though.

They were actually featured on the Start Up Junkies series which gives you a great idea of what it was like getting their service up and running:

http://www.hulu.com/start-up-junkies

What do services like this do with mailed documents for which you might want to retain as originals - contracts w/ physical signatures, grandama's handwritten letter, etc?

I'm not sure about earth class mail, but Swiss Post Box will deliver them.

Using the default settings, if I'm not mistaken, only envelopes will be scanned. You then get to decide to either open and scan or physically deliver letters. Scanned documents can be delivered, too, but paperclips or staples may be removed.

Earth Class Mail will deliver them. And not just documents, I've had packages delivered to ECM and had them hang on to them until I had an address to deliver it to. There's a storage fee, but it's nothing compared to the monthly fee.

I wonder if the NSA might start promoting this technology to close the 'snail mail loophole' that Jimmy Carter uses? [1]

[1] http://news.yahoo.com/former-us-president-carter-uses-snail-...

Is there any reason the NSA can't open snail mail?

They can, but the recipent will see that the package has been opened? It's pretty obvious.

Oh that's so obvious I didn't even think of that.

Depends on how badly they want to conceal the information. There's a whole discipline around opening documents covertly (flaps and seals).

There are a number of US laws that protect mail / post explicitly, and don't explicitly protect email. See this article on the matter:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/data_mine_1/2013/06...

One of the laws in question:

http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/uscode/18/I/83/1708

They probably don't have to for most mail. I posted this yesterday in the Jimmy Carter's mail discussion thread. tl;dr It isn't difficult (at least in principle) to read mail through the envelope. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7456157

It isn't needed, at least for the metadata part. see "Mail Covers": http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mai...

That is where all this talk about "what will the Post Office do in the age of ..." goes - they will help me manage all this stuff and rubbish. I will trust the post office to open and scan my mail, far more than I will JRandomStartup.

And then they can handle a one stop bill payment service for me, and as I trust them, they can generate a CA and I will put it in my phone and suddenly they own the customer experience for everyone.

> I will trust the post office to open and scan my mail, far more than I will JRandomStartup

Interesting, my feeling is the opposite - I've lost count of the number of envelopes I've received that have been partially opened up to check if there are credit cards etc inside. I seem to remember seeing that one postal worker a day is caught stealing mail in the UK.

I would absolutely not trust the UK Post Office to open my mail.

Are there international stats? There aren't very many mail services I would trust, but I would trust the swiss one. Just a gut feeling, though.

but, JRandomStartup and PO will both draw from the same pool of people willing to do a shit job for low pay. In that pool the number of people willing to open a Xmas card for the cash inside is x%. The same x% chance must apply whomever opens your mail.

The USPS already opens a lot of my mail. Sometimes they even decide to keep it if it's something nice. Not very trustworthy in my opinion.

Indirectly related, but can anyone recommend a service to do OCR+tagging of documents? I frequently run into situations where I know I have that important letter somewhere, but just cannot put my finger on it, then start daydreaming about grep'ing for it in ~/snailmail.db. A possibly good way to package this would be a smartphone app where I can scan my letters with the camera, and have them OCR'ed, tagged, and uploaded to, e.g. DropBox.

Probably not 100% what you're looking for, but I just use http://www.pdfscannerapp.com/ for a subset of that usecase.

There are a lot of smartphone apps that probably do this too, but I'd rather do it all on the laptop.

(As a scanner I use some cheap multi-function printer/scanner that OS X automatically detects and scans from over wifi)

I just sort all of the things in folders. I haven't seen a need for more advanced tagging yet.

I pay $45/year for Evernote; they OCR everything I put into them, and I put all of my paper mail into it. Also, I configured a fax number from Phaxio, which pushes the PDF right into Evernote (for those who won't email me something).

It doesn't have automatic tagging, but the OCR is very good.

I was using Evernote, but then I saw how much the upgrade is (and it is a subscription too). Is it worth it over the totally free OneNote?

I do see that OneNote mobile doesn't have OCR, but I wonder if you could rely on your desktop to perform OCR for you, and then the phone could search the results?

For $50/year, I get Evernote on my Nexus 5, my Macbook Air, my iMac at home, web browser, and my most favorite component, the Evernote Chrome Web Clipper.

I pay more for Netflix, and I get so much more out of Evernote. I'd prepay for life if I could.

So, to answer your questions:

> Is it worth it over the totally free OneNote?

For me, most definitely. I've built it into my workflow. For you, that depends on value.

> but I wonder if you could rely on your desktop to perform OCR for you, and then the phone could search the results?

As I mentioned, for $50/year (which I make in less than half an hour), it just works.

I'm interested in the same thing.

Just recently I had enough and started investigating. Ordered a nice (Linux supported) document scanner. Checked out solutions online. So far, nothing prebuilt seems to do what I want:

- full page ocr of everything I throw at it

- tagging for a basic workflow ('bill', 'payed at $date') (bonus points for ways to extend the tagging programmatically, for example based on the ocr result)

- completely self-hosted (but not a desktop app)

My conclusion right now is that I need to pick up a language I like/I care about and build it myself.

I read the first half of that title and though "oh god, here we go again". Then I realised (1) it's Switzerland, not the US/NSA, and (2) it's actually a useful service.

Go Switzerland!

Extra paragraph to compensate for the HN comment truncation bug.

Interestingly, they are also attacking the "problem" of snail mail from another angle:

ePostOffice [1] is an online control panel and inbox, allowing recipients to select how they'd like to receive communications [from participating senders]. It's in a limited pilot phase right now, but seems promising.

A final interesting tidbit: Swiss Post has a financial subsidiary called PostFinance which handles most of Switzerland's wire transfers. Most invoices include a (machine-readable) payment slip. OCRing that payment slip and importing it into PostFinance's e-banking platform seems like an interesting idea. The different divisions have begun to more closely integrate their services, and recently launched a large campaign promoting the variety of Swiss Post's offerings. We'll see how it goes.

[1] http://www.post.ch/en/post-startseite/post-privatkunden/post...

Didn't Outbox try this and shut down a couple of months ago?

Yes. According to the Outbox blog "senior leadership of USPS made it clear that they would never participate in any project that would limit junk mail and that they were immediately shutting down our partnership" http://blog.outboxmail.com/post/74086768959/outbox-is-shutti...

Being self employed and living a very nomadic life (1.5 years with all my belongings in a 70l backpack), this service has been incredibly useful for me since there are a lot of services requiring me to have a snail mail address. If you are a Swiss citizen, I can only recommend getting an account.

NB: I have been in the same bureau as the original project lead and consulted in several aspects of the project.

Therefore I have been a customer for the last 4 years, with three years not being associated with the Swiss Post as employee anymore. I couldn't be happier with the service as it provides me with snail mail addresses in four countries whilst I only did a single payment for those - now I only pay by mail volume.

As a former user and fan of Outbox, it makes me both happy and jealous to see the Swiss post take this on. It makes so much sense. Too bad the USPS is so dependent on junk mail to ever try this. Or..if they did they would mess it up by blasting your "e-post-box" with e-junk-mail.

Hey I can understand one would like that service, but the price at which they are providing it is really high! As a swiss citizen, I'd never subscribe :s

I wouldn't subscribe whilst in Switzerland either, but I'am considering using their service while traveling. Since I only have to actually open about 2-3 Mails per month, I think the price is ok. At least a don't know anybody who would (and I trust to) handle my mails for ~36 CHF per month except my parents. But I feel kind of bad using them as my "secretaries".

Wondering how the privacy is taken into equation while scans are done of the mail.

It's answered in the FAQ: http://www.post.ch/en/post-startseite/post-privatkunden/post... .

Postal secrecy is taken seriously in switzerland.

It doesn't cover that this potentially breaks the Secrecy of Correspondence, which is a fundamental law in some countries, including Switzerland. IANAL, and certainly not a Swiss one, but in Germany, there is a similar project (EPostBrief), which suffers from that problem: once the letter is unwrapped, the law doesn't bite anymore, as it doesn't apply to digital transmissions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence

It doesn't matter how much your provider insists that they keep things secure.

I have some connection to that company and would definitely agree with the sibling post that privacy is a huge concern for them.

Another interesting thought is this: All your snail mail metadata is (obviously, but have you recently thought about it?) already available in digital form: No one's reading the addresses by hand on your letters or parcels (unless absolutely necessary, i.e. OCR fails).

So they (post services in general) already constantly have to handle the (digital) information of person A sending something to person B, at roughly time X. Feels like smtp.

The scanning center is based in one of the three post relay centers that Switzerland has. To get into one of these, you need a batch.

Then, inside this building (which is huge, like three soccer arenas), there is a glass building that has yet another batch only access with revolving doors that only has space for one person.

So getting the mail out of there (aka stealing) will be hard.

As for the concern that some person other than yourself will read your mail, that is true. As a customer, you will sign a voucher that you are ok with specific Swiss Post employees being able to read your mail.

I used to have a service in Sweden that did this (Abuni) but they failed to get acquired and shut down. As someone who travels a lot, it was a godsend, and I don't know what I'm going to do to replace it.

In the english version the "Number of letters monthly (incl. envelope scan)" is missing:

Single Easy: 0 Liberty Plus: 100 Professional: 400

Would love to use it, but a little bit too expensive.

The Finnish postal service is at least testing this as well. I don't know about the current status of that effort however.

I use virtualpostmail.com for the same purpose; it's a bit easier if you're US-based.

I have been using this service for years. I started using when I lived overseas, but now I will never quit. With my bank bill pay, I am pretty much paperless.

X.400 called from the 80's and said "what took you so long :-)"

NSA's wet dream.

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