I was just turned on to Earth Class Mail, a service that scans your postal mail and shows you images of it online and then allows you to shred it or forward it to the location of your choice, by Chris Knudsen. I haven't signed up yet, due to the lack of a Salt Lake City street address, but I can't wait to sign up once they get one.

ECM is one of the last barriers to working remotely that I've been facing. I've got phones handled. I can deposit checks while on the road, but I wasn't sure of the best way to receive those checks. I'm currently using temporary forwarding by the USPS, but that isn't nearly as ideal as ECM.

My wife's first question was "How do you know they're not stealing your mail or your identity?" Well, I don't, except that they've been featured on CNBC and Mogo HD so I figure they're a real company that really wants to stay in business.

They appear to be in early startup mode, so I'm assuming within a few months they'll have addresses in every major metro, ready to go. Hopefully they'll have street addresses because then they can receive UPS and FedEx packages as well.

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I actually heard about this service a few months ago. I also was disappointed with the lack of an SLC address.

The part that deterred me was my wife has a few subscriptions to fitness magazines, and while they could be forwarded, it seemed like it was a little of pain for an individual to reset up all the addressed to forward to the various locations.

For a business, however, I feel like they are on a good start ridding snail mail. When they have a more "solid" product I'll use it for business (addresses, and a few other things) I'll use it.

Good idea though.

I've also been watching the series on Mojo. I've found it doubly interesting since they're somewhat of a slant-competitor to Sendside. Unfortunately, I think that they're not really jumping the curve. They're still paper mail (although they deliver scans of the outside of the envelope electronically) and as such, they don't address the real curve, which is to most communications online.

(I think they're current cost is $10 for any piece of mail that's forwarded to a customer. Much less of course for one that's not.)

Something of a pitch here but you can request a membership to Sendside here: http://sendside.squarespace.com/sendside-beta-account/

We'll see who wins. Certainly Earth Class Mail is a useful service, I just doubt that the real future of communication is tied up in paper and that as a business, they can stay profitable when online communication and storage is so cheap...

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