The paperless office should be everyone’s holy grail. I try my best to persuade any organisations I do business with to communicate by email and to use PDFs instead sending documents by mail. Despite this, a significant number of businesses (and individuals) insist on writing letters and using stamps. It’s annoying, I know, but every year the pile of envelopes on my doormat diminishes. The message is slowly getting through.
Paperless office guru Joe Kissell, who wrote a book on the subject, has been talking about extending his paperlessness in this article in MacWorld. His tip is to have paper mail sent to a mail-handling centre where the documents are scanned and forwarded by email. Apparently there are many companies offering these services. Joe has been using Earth Class Mail for four years and is very happy with their service. He lists a number of alternatives in his MacWorld article.
One of the neat tricks is that you can have addresses in several different countries. Joe, for instance, lives in France but has an Earth Mail address in the USA so he can maintain a US credit card and sign up for a local iTunes account and for other services that are available to US residents only. With a few international addresses and accompanying Skype telephone numbers you can now appear to be in several places at once.