Opening the Box: Swiss Post launches online postal mail addresses in Europe
By David Widner, Earth Class Mail
A prestigious European mailing address for your business or personal use is now just a few clicks away.
We’re happy to announce that Swiss Post Box, which licenses Earth Class Mail’s technologies, is open for business, providing the benefits of online postal mail to anyone, anywhere, at addresses in Switzerland and Germany. And that’s just the start — addresses in Austria, France, and Italy will be available next month.
Just like with Earth Class Mail, postal mail sent to you at any of these European addresses will be quickly and conveniently accessible to you online, from wherever your travels take you, in the same completely redesigned user interface (see below) that we recently released for our customers.
To take a tour of Swiss Post Box, visit this page and click the “Movie, 16 MB” text link.
Or if you’re already sold on this service, you can sign up for an account right now with the people who invented trust and dependability — Swiss Post.
Meet the New Earth Class Mail: Transferring Mail
By David Widner, Earth Class Mail
Welcome to our version of the “Forward” button in email. If your Earth Class Mail account has multiple recipients (in most cases that’s a business, but sometimes it’s a family), whenever you receive a mail item in your inbox that should be handled by someone else on the account, our redesigned application makes it quick and easy to move the digital version of the paper-mail item to that person’s inbox .
In the Transfer Mail interface above, you either look up that person’s name or find it in a list, add comments as to why the item is being handed off (optional), click “OK,” and instantly transfer the item to the person’s account. From there, it’s up to the new recipient whether to have the item opened and its contents securely scanned, or to have it recycled, shredded, or forward-shipped.
This wraps up our blog preview of the new Earth Class Mail, which officially launches within the next two weeks. For more details about the new interface and its features, we encourage you to take our online tour.
Meet the New Earth Class Mail: Shipping Upgrade
By David Widner, Earth Class Mail
Of all the areas of customer feedback we’ve received over the past few years, shipping tops the list by far. We listened. In our new application, set for official release later this month, the creation of mail and parcel shipments to customers has been distilled to three easy steps.
First, you type in the name of the recipient and the destination address (or complete the form instantly using our new Address Book feature).
Next, as shown below, you choose the carrier (either USPS or FedEx) and priority level of the shipment, request insurance coverage on it (optional), enter customs info if it’s an international shipment, add any special packing or delivery instructions, and pick the ship date. You’ll get a cost estimate for the shipment on the spot. Speaking of which, we help you keep costs under control by passing along our highly competitive FedEx volume discounts and by letting you ship a single item via untracked USPS First-Class mail for as low as $2.95 (both domestic and international).
Finally, you’ll get a complete summary of your shipment for review and approval (see below). That’s it — no fuss, no muss, no surprises.
Meet the New Earth Class Mail: Folders and Filters
By David Widner, Earth Class Mail
In redesigning Earth Class Mail (the new application will be officially released in mid-June), we knew that if we were to be successful in making the user experience like that of email, we had to give customers the ability to quickly locate and retrieve mail items within their online account, no matter when the items were received and what actions had been taken on them. And we wanted it all to involve no more than a couple of clicks.
Step one (shown below) was letting customers create customizable folders for filing mail, similar to those of the most popular email services.
Step two was the addition of a new “Filter by…” drop-down menu (highlighted below) that lets users sort mail items into such groupings as viewed, unviewed, recently completed scans, all scans, not scanned, and older than 30 days.
When used in tandem with the folders and the “View All” option in the left column of the UI, the filtering menu becomes a powerful search-and-retrieve tool that’s particularly helpful to customers who have accumulated a large inventory of mail and need to find a certain item ASAP. Read more
Meet the New Earth Class Mail: Hover View
By David Widner, Earth Class Mail
In redesigning our online postal-mail user interface (the new version officially launches in mid-June), we set out to create a hybrid app that combines how people manage paper mail in the physical world and how they use email in the digital world.
For example, consider the common scenario of someone standing in front of a mailbox and quickly flipping through envelopes and flyers to determine which items are important and actionable (such as personal letters, bills, tax refunds, and legal documents) and which ones can be discarded without a second glance. Now, how to mirror that scenario online?
Our solution: Add thumbnail images of the scanned envelopes and parcels to our new application’s list-view display, and then let the user see enlarged versions of the images simply by hovering over the thumbnails, as shown above. Read more
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