Paperless Mail?
from the do-we-need-that dept
In what may have been an unfortunate case of good timing, the company PaperlessPOBox.com launched this September. What they do is have you send all your mail to a post office box, which is picked up by a carrier. They then have automated systems to scan your mail and email it to you as a PDF file. Right now it's mostly being used by people who are travelling a lot, so they don't miss out on important mail. However, one person has signed up for the service to "protect" themself from anthrax.
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Then the robot arms put each page into a scanner, one at a time?? Does the robot arm then put all the paper in the garbage? What OCR is used? What is to customers have the same name? Does it also scan the address to identify the unique reciepient?
The list is endless. Com'on Mike, wake up ! I say this is all just a front for a guy with a scanner in his basement making a few extra bucks.. Which is fine, that is probably more reliable, but the bit about "automated machinery" is just a PR stunt.
PS: What a joke. 70% OCR accuracy? Even if he does have machinery, it sucks. Wordperfect 2 had better OCR.
At the plant, automated machinery identifies the recipient on the envelope, extracts the mail, and scans the mail for cyber-delivery. Recipients receive a facsimile-type image as a PDF file in their e-mail boxes.
"We spent a lot of time on matching so we have these images we need to do optical character recognition on each address and then systematically associate them with the customer and route it to the right person," said company founder David Nale. "And our software is able to do that with a high level of certainty — about 60 to 70 percent of the time."
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I know the secret
*shivers at the though*
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Obvious link here
Excellent way to arrange a DOS attack. Imagine the poor postie sagging under the weight of all those e-mails ;-)
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