Mail Forwarding Service From Us

[MikeB]

Hi All,I'm looking for advice on which mail forwarding service to use to forward mail from the US to the Philippines. I need a full service company that I can check items through their web site that I want forwarded and discard the junk I don't want. Two of the main ones are http://www.usglobalmail.com/prem.asp and http://www.usabox.com/ but there are others. If it's sent USPS International it will fall into the hands of PhilPost but FedEX, DHL, etc are much more expensive. If anyone has 1st hand experience with this I would appreciate whatever advice you have.Thanks

[Jake]

Hi All,I'm looking for advice on which mail forwarding service to use to forward mail from the US to the Philippines. I need a full service company that I can check items through their web site that I want forwarded and discard the junk I don't want. Two of the main ones are http://www.usglobalmail.com/prem.asp and http://www.usabox.com/ but there are others. If it's sent USPS International it will fall into the hands of PhilPost but FedEX, DHL, etc are much more expensive. If anyone has 1st hand experience with this I would appreciate whatever advice you have.Thanks

Excellent post MikeB -- I am curious myself if anyone has any past or current experience dealing with mail forwarding.One would assume you need to register at the local PI post office by submitting your resident certificate.Jake

[Call me bubba]

THIS IS A article that I read a few weeks ago, its been partly edited to remove some extra adverts.as he listed above , I included some more info on the service . If you’re planning to spend your retirement overseas you may want to hire a mail forwarding service in your home country to receive you mail and forward it to you at your overseas home. There are a number of considerations.

• You may want to keep your mail coming to a single USA address, especially if you are not sure if your overseas living experiment will be successful or if you are not sure where you will finally settle.
• Some institutions and agencies will not open or continue an account for you if you have an overseas address.
• You may not want sensitive financial information coming to the Philippines through the Philippine Postal Service. If you’re fortunate enough to have substantial assets, it’s best to keep that information to yourself. Internet-only access is another solution but one that is not always available.
• Some seek to change their residency from a high-tax state to one with no income tax.

usabox.com They provide you with a Miami street address. You notify all correspondents of your new address and your mail starts flowing there. Usabox.com assigns a bar code to each piece of incoming mail. They scan the outside of each letter. At your request, they will send you an email notifying you of each new piece of mail arriving in your box. You log on to the usabox.com website and review the items in your box. You can see the scan of the front face of each envelope you have received. That really helps figure out if something is junk or important. You mark each to be retained in your box, to be discarded or to be forwarded to you anywhere in the world. Under the plan I selected, the charge is $10.00 per month plus shipping. If I want my mail forwarded to me in the Philippines, they usually use DHL overnight and I get the shipment in about three days. It costs me about $32 per shipment of one pound. Each additional pound is $5.95. These rates are very good for FedEx/DHL international express shipments. Sometimes I’ll include a book or some other item I especially want. I’ll order from amazon.com, have the item shipped to my usabox.com address and they will express mail it to me with my next shipment. I only have my mail sent to me every several months, so the monthly cost is reasonable. As noted above usabox.com only scans the outside of the envelope. You can decide to have them throw the mail away or mail it to you — in my case by FedEx or DHL. That’s the only and very expensive way to see what’s inside. Emailing a scan of what’s inside the envelope is faster and cheaper. Usually, I don’t really need the mail, I just need to see the contents. The New York Times has an article on a remailing service which scans the contents of your mail and emails it to you. This new service seems worth a look. One disadvantage; usabox.com gives you a U.S.A. street address, www.earthclassmail.com gives you a P.O. box address unless you want to pay extra for a street address. Some businesses will not accept a P.O. box address. Recent news articles raise uncertainties about the future of this service. See http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2009/02/09/daily18.html When you select a mail forwarding service, do your best to find out how long it has been in business and how many customers it has. It would be a nightmare to get all your mail going to a remailer and then have them go out of business. When this happens, the US Postal Service may then return all your mail to the original sender as undeliverable. Getting a new address and getting all your mail changed over to it will not be fun. This is not a theoretical problem. When shipping to the Philippines, we suggest you avoid DHL. USABox receives our mail at a Miami address and forwards it to us .They have been using DHL as the shipper. More recently DHL service has been disappointing. Although our shipments are prepaid, DHL collects additional fees such as “informal entry declaration”, “import processing fee” and “customs documentary stamps” despite the shipment being all forwarded mail with no value. In our view, DHL is responsible for clearing our shipments with Philippine customs. The way they performed this job was resulted in extra charges – P548.60 extra on a supposedly pre-paid shipment. The DHL office opened our package to confirm that the contents were documents. They were, but it made no difference. They insisted on payment. Further, it was a bit disconcerting to have our mail, including investment account statements and bank statements rifled through in front of other customers. When we contested these fees DHL threatened to declare our shipment to be “abandoned”. Since our forwarded mail included our 2008 tax documents, we had no choice but to pay the DHL fees. Link to the NYT article: http://tinyurl.com/6p3h38Link to the service: www.earthclassmail.com

[Jake]

Thank you Ed for the heads up on DHL. You're on a roll sir, keep posting -- we all appreciate it!Respectfully -- Jake

[MikeB]

Thanks Ed, that's great information. Much appreciated!