A method and apparatus for processing mail is provided. Mail is placed into an input been having a conveyor that conveys the mail towards a feeder. The feeder serially feeds the envelopes to a cutter that severs the top edge of the envelopes. A transport conveys the envelopes from the top cutter to an extractor. The extractor opens the edge-severed mail and presents the contents of the envelopes to an operator who manually extracts the contents. From the extractor, the operator manually feeds the extracted documents to a document input. From the document input, the documents are fed to a document transport that conveys the documents past an imaging module to obtain image data for the documents before sorting the documents to output bins.