Hacker News Reader

Comment by sivers | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com