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The Swiss postal service has started redirecting some mail from the letter box to the in-box.
A program introduced by the Swiss Post in June allows subscribers to receive scans of their unopened envelopes by e-mail message and then decide which ones they want opened and scanned in their entirety, to be read online.
Subscribers can also ask to have the contents archived, send unopened letters to another address or have them shredded and recycled.
The success of the program, called Swiss Post Box, will depend on how widely digital mail is accepted, said Mark Levitt, a former analyst at the International Data Corporation in Washington, a research firm.
“Even people who warmly embraced digital tools stopped short of giving up on paper,” he said. “In fact, the electronic age has generated even greater demand for printers, paper and ink because people have even more information that they feel the need to print out on paper to read.”
The program uses technology provided by Earth Class Mail, a company based in Seattle that has tens of thousands of individual subscribers worldwide, mostly in Britain, the United States, Canada and Mexico. Clients in those countries have mail sent to one of more than two dozen designated addresses for processing.
This is the first time that Earth Class Mail has licensed its technology to a postal service.
Earth Class Mail’s chairman, Ron Weiner, said the company was talking with other national postal services in Europe and Asia about similar partnerships. He would not elaborate.
Basic service for Swiss Post Box starts at 19.90 Swiss francs, which is about $18.35. In North America, clients pay $10 to $60 a month for Earth Class Mail’s service, depending on how much mail they want scanned.
Michael Laprade, who has used Earth Class Mail for two years, said he had few items forwarded to him, other than the occasional check, and he had confidential items like credit card statements shredded.
“There are very few things you get that you actually have to have in your hand,” said Mr. Laprade, who lives primarily in California but spends the winter in France.
Earth Class Mail says its users recycle 90 percent of their mail. By comparison, the United States Postal Service reported that 40 percent of the mail it processed was recycled.
The Swiss Post Box service is available in several cities in Switzerland and in Frankfurt. The postal service intends to add services in France, Italy and Austria.
At a later stage, Swiss Post expects to offer the service in all locations where Swiss Post International has a presence: Belgium, Britain, Denmark, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Sweden and the United States.
But Mr. Weiner said Swiss Post Box would meet more rigorous standards for data handling than those required by the European Union. Nevertheless, some experts say, digitized mail could be more prone to abuse by a rogue employee.
Mr. Weiner said that Earth Class Mail had not had any security breaches, either by employees or by hackers, since its introduction. He said operational employees did not have access to mail that had been opened and scanned and that the digital images were encrypted.
“Our security is extremely robust,” he said. “There’s a huge amount of infrastructure.”
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Swiss Postal Service Is Moving Some Mail Online
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Swiss Postal Service Is Moving Some Mail Online
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