Kristian Kalsing

Becoming increasingly annoyed with all the wasteful and mostly useless amount of paper ending up in my letter box, I decided to actively take up the fight against it. I basically contacted all the entities sending me snailmail and asked them to please send me emails instead. The end result is that I practically no longer have any mail coming to my mail box.

I have previously had an outburst about how snailmail should be a thing of the past. I became very keen on the idea of a managed PO box that I could use as my postal address. A few companies out there offer this service and will scan your mail and let you manage it through an online portal. Great.

But getting a company to scan your mail for you is really just treating the symptoms. Why should all this mail temporarily be turned into paper when it was all electronic to start with? Inefficient and wasteful to say the least. Optimally, companies that require to mail me something would use email in the first place. And think about all the costs they would save, so it’s hard to understand why they aren’t just doing that.

So, I thought I would embark on a mission to eliminate all snailmail. Ideally, I don’t want anyone or anything to send me letters. Over the last couple of months I have kept a log of any mail coming in. I then went through the log and contacted all the entities sending me mail with a request to please send all correspondence via email only.

I have all along received my mobile phone bill and Internet bill as emails only. Good on those companies for having that as the standard option. The bills are securely delivered and I can easily file them for future reference. But what about the rest of my bills and other correspondence that lands in my mailbox? Well, this is how I went with eliminating the rest of my snailmail:

• Credit card statements. Through the self-service online portal, this bank was actually actively promoting switching to email statements. A simple update to my profile details made it all happen.
• Bank statements. Unfortunately, my bank claimed that regulation requires them to send out a paper statement at least every six months. Considering that the bank providing my credit card had no issues with emails, I’m not sure whether they really are required by law to send me dead trees.
• Health insurance bills and newsletters. Like with the credit card statement, this was just a matter of changing my details on their online portal.
• Utilities bills. This one was quite a daunting task to tackle. The utilities provider in my town is notorious for not responding to customer emails and leaving people on hold for hours on end. Hoping that I could avoid spending half my life on hold I emailed them a couple of times, but predictably I never got a reply. When I finally got through on the phone, they couldn’t do anything to accommodate my request. They said this service was under consideration but no timeframe was available.
• Superannuation statements. Fortunately another easy one. The paperless option was being promoted on the online portal and very easy to sign up for.
• Car insurance bills and newsletters. This company does not provide an online portal but via a quick phone call they had updated my details to send all correspondence via email only in less than two minutes.
• Post office notifications. Obviously parcels cannot be squeezed into emails but wouldn’t it be great if the notice from the post office came in an email instead? In that way, I could pick up a parcel from the post office on the way home on the same day as it was delivered. Although they thought it was an excellent idea when I called them, they currently do not offer this service.

All up, I’m pretty happy with the result. Apart from the half-annual bank statement and the utilities bill, I no longer receive any snailmail. Having bills, statements and other documents arriving electronically via email makes archiving a whole lot simpler and it’s much easier to find papers when I really need them. And I haven’t even touched on the environmental benefits.

Related posts:

1. Snailmail should be a thing of the past
2. Internet-enabled cameras are coming

Kristian Kalsing Life 2.0