While the email has become a circadian aspect of the Internet era, traditional, postal mail is also still a very mundane presence. But with the increasing need for classic documents to evolve and become digitized, the postal mail industry is also affected, and Microsoft is prepared to offer a solution designed to take classic letters online. Via a partnership with Earth Class Mail, the Redmond company will offer a solution for the delivery of postal mail online. Microsoft informed that Earth Class Mail's solution was built on its on .NET technology as a Web-based software infrastructure that will digitize postal mail and make it available independent of a sender's address anywhere in the world.

"We deliver your postal mail to wherever you are in the world, any time of day," explained Ron Wiener, CEO of Seattle-based Earth Class Mail. "We do this by imaging the outside of the envelopes and by showing you, on the Web, both sides in full color. Once the envelopes are in your online mail box, you can read a certain letter by asking the service to open it and scan it for you. Or you can recycle it, shred it, transfer it to your accountant, archive it, forward it to your hotel and so forth. Essentially, anything you would tell an admin to do with a certain piece of mail, you can do with a mouse click from anywhere in world."

"The story we're telling today is that it makes sense for post offices to let people choose how they want to receive their mail, as well as when they want to receive it, where and in what form. The Earth Class Mail solution fits into this story perfectly because it allows you to receive physical mail electronically in a very convenient way. Also, the Earth Class Mail team has excellent knowledge of the postal industry and a strong background in the document management business. When you consider all the databases and security requirements behind their solution and the images that require storage, our technology was a great fit for Earth Class," added Maxim Lesur, Worldwide Postal Industry managing director at Microsoft.

Of course this means that actual operators will be handling personal and private mail. And in this context it will all come down to an issue of trust between clients and the postal companies, that will have to set up confidentiality measures. In order for such a system to deliver postal email via the Internet, an operator will have to physically open and scan the contents of the envelope. And there is nothing in human nature that will guarantee that the operators won't sneak a peak. However, Lesur claims that it is not a privacy concern.

"Confidentiality is even more important because people are understandably concerned about who might be scanning their documents. Here again, we have a number of physical operations and business practices that ensure privacy, including a new video witness system we're developing that will enable customers to view their own mail being processed at any time", Wiener stated.