Living Without Snail Mail

It’s amazing what I find out about how our home life operates when the Chief Home Officer (aka my wife) is not here.  One of the more disturbing things I have discovered this week is how much mail we get that is utter waste.

Every day our mailbox is crammed full of catalogs, credit card offers, and all sorts of other junk.  Aside from the occasional thank you card, there is nothing of value at all arriving via the postal service.  So why is there not a move to do more?  Where is the USPS on offering digital alternatives?

In Finland, as of March of this year, there were over 300,000 homes subscribed to NetPosti, their digital mail service.  NetPosti opens all mail, scans, and makes it available via secure “inbox” for their subscribers.  Mail is forwarded to a facility responsible for handling all of the inbound mail, much like companies such as Shoeboxed.com do for businesses in the U.S.

Finland is obviously a very small country, with nowhere near the volume of mail that is generated in the US, but shouldn’t someone be paying attention anyway?

I did some quick calculating to figure out how much unwanted mail is costing me to process every day:

  • Approximately $5,000 in in-house labor (based on 15 minutes a day to handle the mail)
  • $150 in paper costs (330 days of mail a year, 10 pieces of mail a day, $.04/piece of mail).  This is extremely conservative, and does not take into account postage, catalogs, etc.  Assume every piece of junk mail is a couple of sheets of paper plus the envelope.
  • Increased recycling costs for the city, which I pay in the form of higher taxes
  • Increased landfill usage for the city, which I pay in the form of higher taxes

If you add to this what it takes to get the mail to me every day, it gets even scarier:

  • The USPS is the largest fleet of vehicles in the US.  The cost of maintenance and high fuel costs increases the cost of postage every year.
  • Airplanes flying mail from city to city, creating more weight on the planes and increasing the cost of flights.
  • People to drive the mail trucks
  • Paper costs
  • The number of trees that are cut down to create all of this waste
  • Environmental costs
  • And so on… you get the idea.

The obvious concern with going to digital mail is the privacy problem.  If some organization (government or otherwise) is opening all mail, that is going to cause people heartburn.  My answer to that is that most people trust a company to store all of their email.  Generally there is much more confidential information in email these days than snail mail.

So, assuming that problem is a solvable one, I would love a service that does something like this:

  • I pay a monthly fee based on the amount of mail I receive.
  • I forward all of my mail to a P.O. box, which is maintained by the US version of NetPosti
  • As mail is coming in, I can mark mail from particular addresses and companies as spam.  It is immediately thrown out and never reaches my queue, and because the system is self-learning I cease to receive further mail from these addresses. This would eliminate ALL credit card offers and catalogs from my inbox over time.
  • I could also see the ability to configure rules for handling mail.  If mail is from the IRS, I care about that more than other mail.  Put that in a bucket where I will see it straight away, and maybe send me a notification.

So, there it is.  I am ready to sign up as an early tester today.

Would you forgo traditional mail for a service like the one I described?  If not, why not?  Please post your thoughts in the comments area following this post.