The postal delays that have resulted from the anthrax scares are now causing many of us to re-evaluate our options when it comes to snail-mail. Especially when it comes to paying bills. I know at least three of my friends who had to pay fines or late fees because their bills were not paid on time -- and these are folks who are meticulous about their bookkeeping.

According to Dove Consulting, a Boston-based firm that tracks financial services, 24 percent of Americans now receive their bills online and this represents a seven percent jump in the number of consumers who have converted to online bill payment since Sept. 11.

There are several different ways you can deal with your bills electronically. All, of course, have pros and cons. The biggest advantage is that you don't have to rely on the postal service to settle your bills with your payees. The biggest disadvantage is that there are often hidden fees. Since you are dealing with sensitive financial information, it's always important to be careful and test-drive all the options.

Here are the three basic ways to do this.

ONLINE BANKING: The safest way to go. You receive your bills via snail-mail and then use the bank's Web site to transfer funds from your account to designated payees. The time it takes to have your payment reach your payee can vary from hours to days. Funnily enough, unless your payee has an arrangement with your bank to receive direct payments, your bank may be writing a paper check and mailing it to them (all behind the scenes, of course).

Examples:
Fleet: http://www.fleet.com/jump/jump.asp
Chase: https://chaseonline.chase.com/chaseonline/logon/sso_logon.jsp

DIRECT PAY: This is a way to pay your bills directly to the companies or utilities involved, without going through an intermediary. For example, I recently paid my ConEd bill at ConEd.com and found it painless to do so. Once I found the right page, I entered my account number from my bill, then some numbers from an actual check from my checkbook and instantly I was credited with full payment. Test this out first on one bill to make sure you are comfortable with it.

Con Edison: https://m020-www5.coned.com/cus/main.asp
Verizon: https://www22.verizon.com/secure/pages/viewbill/

ONLINE BILL PAYMENT: Online bill payments aren't directly connected to your bank -- these are independent services that recieve your bills from various vendors and then you make payments to them from one single place -- thus eliminating all those paper bills you get. The services charge a fee (from $5 to $13 a month), so this is not for everyone.

Examples:
PayTrust: http://www.paytrust.com
PayMyBills: http://www.PayMyBills.com

Once you try these out, do write in to techguru@sree.net and let me know about your thoughts on non-snail-mail options.

Send your feedback -- and ideas for coverage: techguru@sree.net

Sree's Site of The Week

Ajeeb.com
http://www.ajeeb.com

As you may have recently read, Al Jazeera, the controversial Arabic all-news channel, is going to launch an English-language version of its site -- aljazeera.net, not dot-com -- next year.

If you can't wait that long to see what Al Jazeera and other Arabic sites are saying about the war in Afghanistan and beyond, then Ajeeb is the site for you. It provides instant, free translation of Arabic web sites into English.

Like FreeTranslation.com and world.altavista.com, which do two-way translations for English and French, Spanish, German, Italian, etc, Ajeeb gives you what is known as a "gist" translation. Basically allowing you to get the flavor of the wording, if not an exact translation. Useful stuff when you know no Arabic at all.

You can go through either the front page of Ajeeb.com and click on "Translation" (using the "Translate" box at the front of Ajeeb.com will not give you an English translation, so make sure you find your way to that inside page). You then type in the URL of an Arabic site and it will go to work on all the HTML text on the page, not the graphics themselves.

I have been using it to visit AlJazeera.net, AlAhram.org.eg (the big Egyptian Paper) and www.bbc.co.uk/arabic (BBC's Arabic-language Web site). I almost never venture beyond the headlines, but that's enough to get a sense of what's going on.

Ajeeb.com
http://www.ajeeb.com

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