Earth Class Fail

One of the most useful services ever to be offered to freelancing digital nomads is the Earth Class Mail check-depositing service announced last July. Unfortunately, they offered the service, but do not actually provide it. At least, not anymore.

If you're unfamiliar with Earth Class Mail, it's a service that receives your paper mail, scans it and puts it online in PDF format for you to read, print or download. Click a button, and they'll shred, recycle, send or store it for you.

This, plus the check depositing service they promised, is ideal for digital nomads traveling the world and earning a paycheck by working remotely. That's why I've sung the praises of this company and their services many times in the past.

The check cashing service was met with enormous fanfare by the press and blogging community, despite the fact that it worked only with Wells Fargo. The company's July 30, 2008, press release said that "the check deposit feature will initially be available only to holders of eligible Wells Fargo business banking accounts. Earth Class Mail plans to integrate with other major banks in the near future."

It's April now, and not only are there no "other major banks" supported by the service, even the Wells Fargo service has been pulled.

As a customer, not a blogger or journalist, I asked Earth Class Mail this week when the service would be restored. Here's their reply:

"Unfortunately I am unable to provide an ETA for when we will have a check depositing feature available. If you would like, I would be happy to add you to our First To Notify list and follow up with you as soon as we have information to share about the feature, any alternatives, or availability."

I would categorize this state of affairs as an Epic Fail. Nine months after announcing a major new service and promising broader application of that service, and still nothing?

Earth Class Mail strikes me as being a good outfit run by competent people. But they don't seem to have enough money or enough people to fully deliver on the promise of their idea.

Mail takes too long to get online. The time varies depending on where in the country your mail is delivered to. In my case, I'm averaging about ten days. That's a long time.

Earth Class Mail is too expensive. The basic service can cost quite a bit, depending on which service plan you choose, how much mail you get and what you choose to do with that mail. There's a lot of uncertainty about how much the service will cost in the end, because the costs of storing, sending, and other things is hard to predict.

Earth Class Mail should offer a junk-mail reduction service, but they don't. (They give you tips, but what would be really nice is if they had the staff to handle the interaction with senders of junk mail.)

The user interface is overly complex, and feels a little dated.

The Earth Class Mail search system is cumbersome and difficult to use. You have to search your mail via index number, which means you need to have captured it, or by recipient -- not sender. You should be able to search by the contents of anything they have already scanned.

Don't get me wrong. I still recommend Earth Class Mail to digital nomads. For starters, it's the only service of its type. The alternative to getting your mail via Earth Class Mail while travelling abroad is to not get your mail.

But I would love to see the vision fully realized. And for that, Earth Class Mail needs more money and more people.

And I would also recommend a partnership with Evernote. By allowing customers to view and store images of mail on Evernote, it would also get scanned and indexed for more powerful searching, and could be stored along with all the other stuff we keep in Evernote.

In the meantime, Earth Class Mail, please get that check deposit service you promised up and running. Nine months is a long time to wait.