Why Earth Class Mail™ Outperforms So-called Digital Mailrooms

Digital Mailrooms Don't Handle Employee Mail at All

There are good reasons Earth Class Mail Corp. is the #1 provider of digital mail in the world, with more clients and more employees using the Earth Class Mail system than any other company's. Top of the list is the remote access and recipient choice afforded by Earth Class Mail Corp.'s unique, patent-pending marriage of digital imaging with the Internet.

The term "digital mailroom" came into currency at a time when it was unable to live up to its name, and it's never recovered. The digital mailroom is a very limited, partial solution to the challenges and opportunities presented by enterprise mail. In fact, we created the category of "Discretionary Mail" precisely because digital mailrooms handle only standardized, one-size-fits-all process mail (which we handle as Automatic Rules Mail).

There's a reason the classic, limited digital mailroom isn't of any use for mail received by employees. The digital mailroom:

• Usually works only for a single corporate department
• Can handle only one type of standardized document, such as an invoice or claim form it has been taught to recognize
• Can handle only one size of envelope, such as a letter-size envelope, leaving you to your own devices with the other four mail streams handled by our mail technology
• Permits no individual employee choice
• Cannot physically cache mail, which is partly why it allows no choice of how to dispose of a piece of mail -- it's the same handling every time
• Is still highly manual -- when operators lose rhythm, costs skyrocket, and
• Is scale-sensitive, so that accounts under $60M/year in revenue are likely to be shunned
• Offers no online or remote access to mail at all!

If your organization receives only one type and size of mail and wants the same thing to be done to it every time, this might work for you. But we don't know of any such companies.

Earth Class Mail for Automatic Rules Mail

The process used by digital mailrooms is to open every envelope, inexplicably toss the envelope along with the addressee information on it, and resort to using “auto classification” OCR to try to figure out what kind of document is inside and who it should go to.

Aside from the obvious illogic of trashing the most accurate indicator of who the recipient is, the problems with such a system include:

• The lack of privacy accorded to potentially sensitive mail (such as attorney-client privileged, work-product-protected, HIPAA-sensitive, etc.)
• When mailroom clerks are empowered to decide what mail is wanted and what is not, mail recipients are completely disempowered
• The auto-classification has only a 55% success rate on the mail that's wanted

There have been a few digital mailroom experiments. A few dozen members of Congress and some Fortune 50 companies have justified them entirely on the basis of security concerns about anthrax and the like. But these mailrooms opened and scanned all mail, regardless of whether it was wanted by anyone, and were thus prohibitively expensive. And they were actually less convenient and slower than regular postal mail.