Going Postal in the Digital Age

The magic of e-mail (aside from instant delivery) is that all of your unwanted spam can be disposed of with the click of a button. If only there was a button to erase the heaps of unwanted paper junk mail that arrives at your front door every day. Wait. Is there one? The geniuses behind Earth Class Mail have come up with a new system for virtualizing your snail mail, so you have a say on whether or not those pesky catalogs wind up wasting space in your house. Their service asks users to forward their mail to one of 18 P.O. boxes, where their envelopes are scanned and posted on a secure website and allows the user to decide whether or not a certain letter is trash or treasure. From there, users can also decide whether they’d prefer to recycle, shred, ship, or open and scan the contents so they can be read online. Not only is Earth Class Mail a seemingly simple solution for eliminating unwanted letters, but it’s also an eco-friendly way to figure out what to do with that inevitable mess of mail.