On Internet, you’ve got (paper) mail

Glorious fall foliage? Too much raking. “The Sound of Music”? Manipulative, sappy, two-dimensional. Mother Teresa? Overhyped.

It must have been a relative of Mrs. K, then, who came up with Earth Class Mail. It’s a service that scans your incoming United States Postal Service mail and displays it on a private Web page. In other words, you avoid everything that would have bothered Mrs. K about paper mail: clutter, paper cuts and the risk of anthrax.

OK, there are a few more substantial reasons why you might want an online mailbox whose address never changes. Maybe you travel a lot, you live in an RV or you spend your winters in Florida. Maybe you’re occasionally stationed overseas. Maybe you’d like all your mail stored online for easy retrieval forever.

Companies may like the concept because it assists with record-keeping and storage, or because it keeps the mail coming even through mergers, moves or downsizings.

At earthclassmail.com, you sign up for a new mailing address, which you distribute to your chosen correspondents. You probably don’t want to fill out an official postal service change-of-address form; magazines, catalogs and packages, for example, are a little tough to scan.

If they do arrive, the company scans only the front and back of magazines, or the shipping label of the package. In other words, you probably want this to be a secondary address, not your only one.

Next thing you know, you start getting e-mail messages that say, “You have new mail. Estimated number of pages: 2 pages or less,” or whatever. There’s even a little scanned picture of the front of the envelope (or the writing side of a postcard).

When you click the link, you go to a private Web page. After you log in, you see your Inbox. You see a little image of each piece of mail, along with its dimensions, weight, date, date of arrival and so on.

You also see several buttons, which provide you the possible options for dealing with your mail individually or all at once: “Scan” tells the company to slit open the envelope and scan the contents. This takes time (one day) and may cost money. You can opt to have every incoming envelope auto-scanned; that saves you time but, if you start getting junk mail, could cost you money.

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