US firm turns snail mail into email

A San Francisco-based startup has launched a new service that turns a person's paper mail into email.

PaperlessPOBox founder David Nale said he created the service to deliver mail any time, anywhere to eliminate paper clutter, claiming that the firm has attracted US customers concerned about anthrax attacks.

"In light of the recent bio-terrorism attacks, [ours] seems like an idea whose time has come," he said.

The company has been working on the technology for the past two years. Among its technology partners are Kodak, Sun Microsystems, Oracle and Dell.

Using the PaperlessPOBox service, mail is forwarded to a central processing centre where high-speed extraction machines open each piece. The mail is then scanned into image files, which are routed automatically to the customers' email boxes as a PDF file.

At present the company has one facility in San Francisco and plans to open another in Henderson, Nevada, just outside Las Vegas, shortly.

With corporate businesses that don't want to change their mailing address, PaperlessPOBox picks up the mail from their office.

Nale said that the service has been successful with Americans living overseas, who have set up a PO box and get their mail by email.

He added that, although the facilities are currently US-based, the company has plans to expand internationally. "We're definitely looking into a global presence and look forward to having an address overseas where people in Europe and Australia will have a paperless PO box," he said.