Who’d have thought that the Swiss would innovate in an otherwise declining market and perhaps accelerate the decline by integrating the physical delivery world with the virtual online world? Mail has been in a decline as more and more people and companies around the world use email and web for communications and billing details and promotional initiatives.

Positioned as a service for those who are frequently away from home but never far from the Internet, the Swiss Post Box service scans sealed envelopes addressed to customers  and e-mails the envelope image to users. With a few clicks, they then decide what happens to the item next.

On request, the item is opened, scanned and emailed as a PDF file. It can also be physically forwarded to any address.

Swiss Post Box is priced at €14.– per month. For business users such as Siemens Mobility (Switzerland and Germany) and Microsoft Switzerland the service operates in much the same way as a fax-server workflow where an employee views the PDF and forwards to the correct person’s email account complete with instructions how to electronically retrieve the rest of the document or where to send the original. The integrated service will be expanding throughout Switzerland, Germany, France, Austria and Italy by the end of July 2009.