Earth Class Mail, the start-up with the vision of traditional posts opening the mail and delivering it electronically, announced a relationship with Microsoft from Post Expo 2007 in Barcelona this week.

Earth Class has moved its Linux-based platform to .NET, as it hinted it would, reportedly picking up speed in the process and using SQL Server.

It will also mean integrating with Microsoft SharePoint and Outlook 2007 (for its keyless encryption) as well as Microsoft's mobility applications (to deliver to PDAs) along with the possibility of using Windows Live Hotmail and an MSN back-end to deliver documents securely via e-mail.

The platform, based on the company's novel Megasorter sorting system, is supposed to help posts transition from expensive logistics in the service of declining markets to the Internet era where Earth Class pictures them prospering by offering "inside the envelop" services, such as scanning content and competing with online giants like Google for the ad dollar.

Earth Class CEO Ron Weiner said .NET will scale the company's proof-of-concept service for both posts and big enterprises and integrate key software applications for ease of use. The Microsoft tie-up is supposed to give Earth Class Mail, which, remember, is a start-up, the credibility and scalability to talk to posts man-to-man.

"Our ultimate goal," Weiner said, "is to help postal operators earn more revenue from advertisers and the first-ever revenue from mail recipients."

Even without digital delivery, the Megasorter promises to reduce sorting labor costs by 70%.

According to Maxim Lesur, the managing director of Microsoft's worldwide postal interests, Earth Class Mail's "technologies facilitate Microsoft's vision of the secure digital delivery of postal mail. The savings in time, money and to our environment are significant and allows the business models to evolve to a receive-pays model."

Microsoft has been courting the posts - and currently has some 60 projects going on around the world - but in Barcelona this week the company put on a full court press to woo the vertical as it never has before.

Presumably it's responding to the realization that the posts could add significantly to its quest to match Google in the online advertising department. Given the posts involvement with advertising it might be the one area where Google can't match it.

Wiener volunteers that Earth Class is working with Microsoft "conceptually" on the "delivery of a new generation advertising."

"We see," he says, "the opportunity to create a hybridized model that combines the best of search advertising models, which provides marketers with a lot of customer information, with the best of direct mail advertising models, which are scalable and produce repeatable revenue results. In our hybrid model whenever customers accept or delete a piece of mail from their electronic mailboxes, they're providing tiny clues to their interests and preferences."
The concept involves rich media and video.

Microsoft's strategy seems to hang initially on getting secure electronic mailboxes deployed, the electronic equivalent of physical mailboxes, a push it's making in Saudi Arabia where physical mailboxes have been uncommon.

Anyway, ahead of the Megasorter, Earth Class Mail is available as an outsourced service or a software-as-a-service platform that posts and large companies can license. Both sides of incoming envelopes are presented securely via the Internet in high-resolution color. The customer then chooses whether to have each piece of mail opened and scanned, shredded, recycled, sent elsewhere or forwarded.

For those worried about the security of other people opening their mail, Earth Mail says that its Microsoft relationship will give it a new "video witness system" they're developing that will enable customers to view their own mail being processed at any time. There are elements of Microsoft software throughout this aspect as well," it said, "because we integrate to various kinds of imaging equipment and barcode readers and so on that plug into Windows-based workstations and the .NET platform."

By the way, Earth Class Mail customers have been recycling 94% of their mail as against the US government's findings that less than 20% of postal mail gets recycled.