Earth Class Mail

I’ve been using this service since 2009. I was genuinely happy with it, until one day they up and changed all of their pricing policies. Almost literally overnight. Beforehand, I was really pleased, and I still think the team at the West Hollywood branch is top notch! But the company has adopted all new pricing policies (read: increased fees), and their infrastructure has yet to show any improvement (e.g., I just had to call in a mail forwarding order because there were 12 pieces and the mobile site can only do them as inefficiently as possible — one at a time).
On the plus: I was contacted directly by the new CEO, and he explained the new policies and their advantages. The downside: since I don’t want all of my mail scanned, the new policies just mean added costs to me with no added benefit. Furthermore, my request to be grandfathered in to the old pricing schedule was denied.
This is a real shame, because I had gone as far as having my Earth Class Mail address on my Driver’s License. Now, I’m going to spend the next 3 weeks changing my address with several different companies — as well as making a fun trip to the DMV — before I completely unwind myself from this service.
Given all of the changes, I cannot endorse this service. If you find yourself in a position where you need to maintain an address in a different city from where you live, I must suggest that you DO YOUR RESEARCH and find a cheaper alternative. As convenient as the mail scanning features can be to some people or companies, please keep in mind that some scans are better than others (based upon both the nature of the sent materials — e.g., colors, font size, paper textures — as well as who did the scanning).
I wish everyone at the West Hollywood office the very best of luck in weathering any changes that the company may adopt in the future. It seems like the new owners want a Return On Investment yesterday (which is one of the reasons I’ve seen increased costs without a commensurate increase in services), and so I hope they don’t start laying people off. As for me, I no longer intend to pay over $ 600 per year for the privilege of having increased obstacles put between myself and my mail (since they now CHARGE to PICK UP you OWN MAIL — on a per item basis).

Sadly this company is a necessary evil. Its not their service that disappoints it’s their pricing there are tons of easy to miss charges that make it extremely expensive. You pay monthly fee, you pay to have things stored, shipped, scanned, and most irritatingly if you decide to pick them up in person you’re charged for that too, at the time of this writing the charge to pick up your own mail was .95 PER item (!) so if you pick up 20 pieces of mail that’ll be $ 19.00 on top of $ 50. already pay for the address per month and .01 cent charge per day (increasing 100% soon to .02 cents) It all adds up. The service is fine just be prepared for huge monthly bills.