Email used to be so hip. Now it is such a pain in the ass. I have written about email management and liberating my email inbox before, but being on the road the last 19 days has turned my inbox upside down. Om Malik wrote a great piece today about email bankruptcy which starts by saying:
"Email sucks."
I agree. I have thousands of messages and I cannot get through them all. I am hoping to get to them soon, but even on a U.S. holiday (July 4th) emails continued to flow in like a river of hell. These days I am finding myself looking for more interesting ways to communicate, whether it be via the notes or comments on Flickr photos, Facebook status, wall or other messages, SMS or Twitter.
All this pondering reminded me of the good old days when getting mail from the post office, that’s right, “snail mail" was the way to communicate. So I did a little poking around and found that there are a couple of products offering users the ability to easily send “snail mail” from the Web. If you think your email inbox is cluttered, now your kitchen counter and office desk can be cluttered too!
Postful offers users the ability to have any email sent via the post office for the charge of $0.99 for the first page and $0.25 for each additional page. Postful's mission is to be the bridge between the digital and physical worlds – thus making easy to send emails as letters to grandparents and other non-email users.
Easy Post, a Canada startup, offers users the ability have mail sent directly from the Web to Canada addresses. Easy Post is free anywhere in Canada.
eSnailer offers users the ability to send any letter over “snail mail” via the Web. eSnailer is free because it is supported by ads and free offers that are shown after you write your letter. Users must accept a free offer in return for the service.
If you want to go the other way and turn all your "snail mail" into email you should check out Remote Control Mail which was highlighted previously on TechCrunch.
Bottom-line: Information overload is a problem regardless of the medium, we can take ongoing measures to defense the problem.
