Postal Evolution: The Digital Mailroom

In our previous blog Postal Evolution: From Horses To The Digital Age, we took a look at the history of postal innovation, from the early days of horseback delivery through the advent of airmail, ZIP codes, and mail tracking software.

The next step in this ongoing evolution is the digital mailroom.

A significant amount of our correspondence – both personal and business – is now digital. We send signed contracts and other documents via e-mail, cloud-based file services (like Dropbox), and other types of secure document sharing apps. Birthday cards and party invitations have been supplanted by e-vites and Facebook messages. While this has led to an overall drop in mail volume, a significant amount of paper mail still has to be sorted and distributed via corporate mailrooms.

And that old corporate mail mindset – that a central mailroom will distribute important business correspondence manually to an employee’s desk – still persists despite the fact that employees are increasingly untethered from their offices. In some organizations, employees don’t even have their own desks, let alone offices; they simply plug a tablet or laptop in at whatever workstation is available. Or they work from home. Or they bounce among satellite offices, working from their phones while in transit.