Swedish e-postal service delivers wherever you want
Forget paper invoices, junk circulars and credit card statements that pile up in the mailbox.
That's what Posten, Sweden's national post office, is encouraging with an Internet mail delivery service that aims to make most physical mail go the way of the typewriter.
"Our vision is that the hall carpet or mailbox will never be cluttered with anything but the occasional love letter or invitation to a party," says Posten spokeswoman Margareta Chowra.
Posten's ePostbox is cheap, environmentally friendly and lets recipients pick up mail at any Internet-connected computer, anywhere in the world.
The Swedish post office is urging large-volume mail-senders like banks, city governments and housing agencies to trade paper correspondence for its Internet service.
To send mail through ePostbox, companies pay about 2 kronor (19 cents) per item, some 25 percent less than it would cost to have the mail delivered by carriers.
The service is free for mail recipients. Customers who register can choose from which companies they want to receive mail electronically.
Posten, which launched the service in December and promotes it with TV and Internet ads, hopes that what's good for its customers will be good for itself.
Like many national postal services, 366-year-old Posten has seen its revenues gouged by competition from private delivery services and electronic messages sent on computers and phones, said Posten vice president Boerge Oesterholm.
"When the market needs are changing, it's natural for us to give the market what it wants," Chowra said.
The service is still in its infancy.
Posten signed up nearly 50 companies, but only 10 have started sending through it. Chowra won't say how many customers have registered. For now, only one bank allows customers to pay bills through ePostbox.
Reineke Reitsman, a technology and consumer behavior analyst at Forrester Research, said the Internet makes sense for direct marketing, traditionally a core business for post offices.
Companies using the service send digital versions of mail items to Posten. Postal workers sort it for distribution to the registered customers' ePostboxes via a secured internal mailing system.
Customers access their ePostboxes through Web browsers with 128-bit encryption.
Canada Post has been offering a similar service since November 1999 and has drawn some 200,000 customers and about 90 companies as users.
A Finnish equivalent, dubbed Netposti, started in January 2001 and has some 130,000 customers and 100 member companies. Spokesman Tom Sandman said the service was not yet profitable.
In the United States, customers can receive and pay bills online through the U.S. Postal Service. They can also send money from a bank account to anyone with an e-mail address. Spokeswoman Sue Brennan would not release usage figures.
The U.S. Postal Service is also testing a system that would allow companies to prepare newsletters and other bulk items electronically that it would then print and deliver to physical mailboxes. The service printed more than 2 million items in fiscal 2001.
But because of lack of interest, the Postal Service recently dropped PosteCS, a system for delivering electronic documents with postmarks.
Chowra, who declined to say how much Posten has invested in ePostbox, said Sweden's service is unique because mail will be delivered physically if it doesn't match an electronic mailbox.
All aspects of Posten's system, from registration to usage and transmission of messages, are secured. An electronic postmark tracks the date and time a message is sent and opened. The postmark guarantees the mail has not been tampered with during transmission.
"The messages never leave Posten's own system," Chowra said. "They are handled within our 'fireproof doors' all the time."
