We invented truly online postal mail, and we've been providing this service longer than anyone else. If you're considering anyone else, be sure to ask them how much experience they have offering the service, what security they employ, how they cache mail (while awaiting your instructions) in a secure manner that also prevents loss, theft, or damage, how many employees they have, whether their technology is guaranteed to be non-infringing of others and therefore unlikely to be abruptly withdrawn, and in what way they are financially stable.

There are a few services we are similar to, such as post-office boxes or mailboxes and mail-forwarding services. The main way we are different is simply that because we invented the concept of remotely accessible postal mail, no one else comes close to offering the features, service, security, scalability, and pricing that we do. We also allow several household or business members to use the service for the same low price.

Post- office boxes comprise 20 million addresses in the United States. Unfortunately, the U.S. Post Office has run out of them in most locations. And of course a post-office box doesn't let you know whether it is worth driving to -- until you're already there. Nor can you receive courier packages at post-office boxes. (Our customers can use both a street address and a post-office box.) Finally, a post-office box address cannot follow you around like an email address, but with Earth Class Mail you'll be able to keep the same address forever! No more changes of address!

Traditional mail-forwarding services are offline. You have no control over your mail, and they charge very high rates for forwarding -- including forwarding your unwanted mail. It's like having a stranger manage your email account, and charge you for forwarding your spam.

There are some mail-forwarding services that operate online. One first notices how expensive they are. They lack the features of Earth Class Mail:, the service offerings, the reasonable prices, and the ability to scale with volume and still maintain great customer service and secure operations (beware of small "suites" or mom-and-pop shops offering to scan your mail in their kitchen).

If they have copied the features of Earth Class Mail, they have two problems. The first is that providing remote, secure access to postal mail is much more technologically complex than most people think, and copy-cats are generally not well-suited to provide a high-level service for very long. The second is that they are likely patent-infringers, and risk being shut down. Unfortunately, this uncertainty of future operations becomes the problem of any customer who risks dealing with them.