Indirectly related, but can anyone recommend a service to do OCR+tagging of documents? I frequently run into situations where I know I have that important letter somewhere, but just cannot put my finger on it, then start daydreaming about grep'ing for it in ~/snailmail.db. A possibly good way to package this would be a smartphone app where I can scan my letters with the camera, and have them OCR'ed, tagged, and uploaded to, e.g. DropBox.
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.
#22Indirectly related, but can anyone recommend a service to do OCR+tagging of documents? I frequently run into situations where I know I have that important letter somewhere, but just cannot put my finger on it, then start daydreaming about grep'ing for it in ~/snailmail.db. A possibly good way to package this would be a smartphone app where I can scan my letters with the camera, and have them OCR'ed, tagged, and uploa…
Probably not 100% what you're looking for, but I just use http://www.pdfscannerapp.com/ for a subset of that usecase.
There are a lot of smartphone apps that probably do this too, but I'd rather do it all on the laptop.
(As a scanner I use some cheap multi-function printer/scanner that OS X automatically detects and scans from over wifi)
I just sort all of the things in folders. I haven't seen a need for more advanced tagging yet.
Re: Swiss Post scans your snail mail and sends it to you via email.
#23That 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…
The USPS already opens a lot of my mail. Sometimes they even decide to keep it if it's something nice. Not very trustworthy in my opinion.
Re: Swiss Post scans your snail mail and sends it to you via email.
#24That 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…
Are there international stats? There aren't very many mail services I would trust, but I would trust the swiss one. Just a gut feeling, though.
Re: Swiss Post scans your snail mail and sends it to you via email.
#25Indirectly related, but can anyone recommend a service to do OCR+tagging of documents? I frequently run into situations where I know I have that important letter somewhere, but just cannot put my finger on it, then start daydreaming about grep'ing for it in ~/snailmail.db. A possibly good way to package this would be a smartphone app where I can scan my letters with the camera, and have them OCR'ed, tagged, and uploa…
I pay $45/year for Evernote; they OCR everything I put into them, and I put all of my paper mail into it. Also, I configured a fax number from Phaxio, which pushes the PDF right into Evernote (for those who won't email me something).
It doesn't have automatic tagging, but the OCR is very good.
Re: Swiss Post scans your snail mail and sends it to you via email.
#26Wondering how the privacy is taken into equation while scans are done of the mail.
It's answered in the FAQ: http://www.post.ch/en/post-startseite/post-privatkunden/post... .
Postal secrecy is taken seriously in switzerland.
Re: Swiss Post scans your snail mail and sends it to you via email.
#27For 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,…
Any problems with earthclassmail? I've heard from people who love them and people who have had problems with them.
Re: Swiss Post scans your snail mail and sends it to you via email.
#28Earlier 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.
Depends on how badly they want to conceal the information. There's a whole discipline around opening documents covertly (flaps and seals).
Re: Swiss Post scans your snail mail and sends it to you via email.
#29Indirectly related, but can anyone recommend a service to do OCR+tagging of documents? I frequently run into situations where I know I have that important letter somewhere, but just cannot put my finger on it, then start daydreaming about grep'ing for it in ~/snailmail.db. A possibly good way to package this would be a smartphone app where I can scan my letters with the camera, and have them OCR'ed, tagged, and uploa…
I'm interested in the same thing.
Just recently I had enough and started investigating. Ordered a nice (Linux supported) document scanner. Checked out solutions online. So far, nothing prebuilt seems to do what I want:
- full page ocr of everything I throw at it
- tagging for a basic workflow ('bill', 'payed at $date') (bonus points for ways to extend the tagging programmatically, for example based on the ocr result)
- completely self-hosted (but not a desktop app)
My conclusion right now is that I need to pick up a language I like/I care about and build it myself.
Re: Swiss Post scans your snail mail and sends it to you via email.
#30Wondering how the privacy is taken into equation while scans are done of the mail.
It's answered in the FAQ: http://www.post.ch/en/post-startseite/post-privatkunden/post... . Postal secrecy is taken seriously in switzerland.
It doesn't cover that this potentially breaks the Secrecy of Correspondence, which is a fundamental law in some countries, including Switzerland. IANAL, and certainly not a Swiss one, but in Germany, there is a similar project (EPostBrief), which suffers from that problem: once the letter is unwrapped, the law doesn't bite anymore, as it doesn't apply to digital transmissions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence
It doesn't matter how much your provider insists that they keep things secure.