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Swiss Post scans your snail mail and sends it to you via email.

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Re: Swiss Post scans your snail mail and sends it to you via email.

#12

That is where all this talk about "what will the Post Office do in the age of ..." goes - they will help me manage all this stuff and rubbish. I will trust the post office to open and scan my mail, far more than I will JRandomStartup. And then they can handle a one stop bill payment service for me, and as I trust them, they can generate a CA and I will put it in my phone and suddenly they own the customer experience…

> I will trust the post office to open and scan my mail, far more than I will JRandomStartup

Interesting, my feeling is the opposite - I've lost count of the number of envelopes I've received that have been partially opened up to check if there are credit cards etc inside. I seem to remember seeing that one postal worker a day is caught stealing mail in the UK.

I would absolutely not trust the UK Post Office to open my mail.

Re: Swiss Post scans your snail mail and sends it to you via email.

#14
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any reason the NSA can't open snail mail?

They can, but the recipent will see that the package has been opened? It's pretty obvious.

Oh that's so obvious I didn't even think of that.

Re: Swiss Post scans your snail mail and sends it to you via email.

#15

I wonder if the NSA might start promoting this technology to close the 'snail mail loophole' that Jimmy Carter uses? [1] [1] http://news.yahoo.com/former-us-president-carter-uses-snail-...

It isn't needed, at least for the metadata part. see "Mail Covers": http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mai...

Re: Swiss Post scans your snail mail and sends it to you via email.

#16
post #9

I wonder if the NSA might start promoting this technology to close the 'snail mail loophole' that Jimmy Carter uses? [1] [1] http://news.yahoo.com/former-us-president-carter-uses-snail-...

Is there any reason the NSA can't open snail mail?

There are a number of US laws that protect mail / post explicitly, and don't explicitly protect email. See this article on the matter:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/data_mine_1/2013/06...

One of the laws in question:

http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/uscode/18/I/83/1708

Re: Swiss Post scans your snail mail and sends it to you via email.

#17
post #9

I wonder if the NSA might start promoting this technology to close the 'snail mail loophole' that Jimmy Carter uses? [1] [1] http://news.yahoo.com/former-us-president-carter-uses-snail-...

Is there any reason the NSA can't open snail mail?

They probably don't have to for most mail. I posted this yesterday in the Jimmy Carter's mail discussion thread. tl;dr It isn't difficult (at least in principle) to read mail through the envelope. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7456157

Re: Swiss Post scans your snail mail and sends it to you via email.

#19
post #8

For what it's worth, for anyone interested, I used this service for years, and they're great. Really nice if you're nomadic and want to have a steady mailing address. In the U.S., https://www.earthclassmail.com/ provides the same service. I think it is (or was) Earth Class Mail's backend software that is/was powering Swiss Post Box, when I was using it. Also great for having a U.S. mailing address for your business,…

I use a similar service for here in the UK.

http://www.ukpostbox.com/

So far no problems.

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