

Outbox Makes Your Snail Mail Digital, Launches in SF - bkohlmann
http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/25/outbox-digitizes-sf-snail-mail/

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notlisted
What a brilliant idea, all the way from 1999! Back then it was called
PaperlesPOBox. EarthClassMail came several years later (2008) and offers
additional conveniences.

The iPad makes everything better! (sarcasm)

On a more serious note: I think the USPS should offer this service. Why trust
a private company with it?

On a practical note: good luck trying to prove your residency for public
schools if your snail mail is forwarded to an address in another state.

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spullara
You don't forward your mail. They pick it up at your mailbox.

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saurik
(You actually can't forward your mail for very long; you can get a half year,
and sort of a year, but the post office really doesn't apparently want to be
in the position of being a routing system.)

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beagle3
Which is really a shame, actually.

I would love to have a virtual address, such as

    
    
        Mr. Beagle3 Esq
        742 Virtuality Road, Suite #3971
        c/o Monopod Iridium Violet
        Cyber, NY 19997
    

And would happily pay a few tens of USD per year for that to be forwarded to
an address of my choosing, and also last-mile routing (e.g., if this address
"resolves" to AZ, I accept paying for the NY->AZ resent -- even though, if
properly managed, this would be resolved at a stage where a resend will not be
needed).

Oh, and in case you wonder - the address including suite, c/o, city and zip
code should together form an error-correcting code, so that e.g. a one digit
error could be automatically corrected -- because otherwise, a one digit error
would reach AZ instead of NY and vice versa.

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gkoberger
All other problems aside: how can they afford to send someone to my apartment
3 times a week for $4.99? Seems like gas alone would be exceed that.

My assumption is that they can't, and the plan is to burn through VC money
with the hopes of getting some sort of eventual deal with the postal service.

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edouard1234567
Not if they have the right density. I think their business model is viable at
scale.

Assume they pay their pick-up guy $20/hour. Each customer is paying $5 for 12
pickups = 60 cents a visit. To break even they will need to do pick-up 33 mail
boxes/hr. This seems like a lot in a suburb but it's possible in a dense city.
They will probably need to tweak their model but it's not unreasonable.

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rosenjon
That's just to pay the pickup guy. You have to pay for gas. And the costs of
operating a batch scanning facility for mail. And most mail is not of uniform
size and does not have uniform contents, so you end up having to manually open
and scan the items.

It's totally unreasonable. The only place it makes even a hint of sense to do
this is at the Post Office, before it goes to the actual customer. The
customer could then choose scan, shred or deliver.

Maybe I'm just not clever enough to get it. But this just seems ludicrous to
me.

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rdl
Their idea is to make revenue from additional sources other than just the
monthly fee.

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rosenjon
What might those be? The check cashing and bill pay mentioned are already
offered for free by banks. Diversion of junk mail marketing $ into "effective
methods" of marketing is pretty cryptic. I think creating some online
equivalent of postal mail would be interesting (there are things like
notarized letters, etc that still seem to require snail mail), but I don't see
how this service as currently implemented really does anything novel. Scanning
your postal mail is tedious and cost ineffective...whether it's done by a
startup or not.

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hakaaaaak
Most mail is junk. What happens to that?

Are you going to scan a single catalog and throw the rest away? That won't
work because some have specific codes required, so you'll have to know which
those are or perhaps scan every catalog cover. Some catalogs are going to be
hell. Just to name a few: Sweetwater has a fairly long one; Blick's art supply
catalog is bigger; Both are free and have wide distribution.

Where do you draw the line between package, parcel, and letter? What do you do
when it is filled with confetti? What if it contains cash. Seriously.

Musical Hallmark cards anyone? Are you going to record them? No? Ok, then.

This is a neat idea and works for some things, but is also very seriously
impractical and insecure for the customer, and a terrible mess on the business
side.

Add to that that people (especially women I'm told, but I know of no studies
to prove that) enjoy real magazines. I personally enjoy getting things in the
mail. It is like a gift. I don't enjoy getting email.

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joshuaheard
I have used VirtualPostMail.com for several years and this is how it works.
They scan the front and back of the envelope (front only for a parcel) and
email you an alert. You view the scan and decide whether to scan the contents.
For instance, you would not scan obvious junk mail, but click on the recycle
button. For large catalogs, they stop at 35 pages and ask you if you want the
whole thing at an extra charge. For parcels, magazines, or documents you want
the original for, like musical valentines or credit cards, they will ship it
to you at your physical address. If you receive a check, they will send it to
your bank's PO box for depositing. Check their website for more inf.

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kalleboo
I use a service like this in Sweden (abuni.se). You change your government-
registered mailing address to a virtual PO box number with them, and all the
companies and agencies that pick your address from the government database
(probably 80% of them in Sweden) will start using it.

Then they scan all your mail and send it to you as PDFs, as well as archiving
it on their site. I've also authorized them to do direct debits with my bank,
so now they automatically pay any bills I get on paper for me automatically on
the due date.

I've been living out of the country for over a year (I haven't even had an
apartment in Sweden), and this system has worked great.

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nwh
What happens if I send you a false invoice, would they still pay it?

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kalleboo
I have to approve each payee separately (by checking it off on the site)

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shrike
I've been using Virtual Post Mail [0] for about 2 years, it has been
excellent. It's a bit more expensive and the implementation is different but
the end result is similar.

[0] <http://www.virtualpostmail.com/>

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dnr
I'm another VPM customer, for a little over a year. I like it and I plan to
continue using it, but the website is definitely a little clunky and could use
a redesign. Still, it's better than all the competing services (at least as of
a year ago when I did my research).

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rosenjon
This idea just doesn't seem to want to die.

I saw an investor presentation for Earth Class Mail back in the day. They
would scan the front of your mail, and then you could choose which items to
have them open. They would then have to manually open and scan the items you
instructed them to open at additional cost.

Earth Class Mail blew threw most of their funding
([http://blog.oregonlive.com/siliconforest/2011/01/earth_class...](http://blog.oregonlive.com/siliconforest/2011/01/earth_class_mail_attempts_rebo.html))
and rebooted with a different focus.

I don't see how this company plans to run a courier service to collect your
mail from random places, then scan it, for $5 a month. The economics make 0
sense.

More importantly, snail mail is dying off. This is like building a business to
make your horse and buggy move faster just as the automobile is being
developed.

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kalleboo
Faxes are also dying out, but there are plenty of companies making a living
off of e-fax services.

Although I agree the economics of picking the stuff up out of your mailbox
makes little sense... Mail forwarding or PO boxes would be far more efficient.

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rosenjon
Any business is about balancing cost structure with revenue potential. For an
e-fax service, once you invest in the initial infrastructure (and these days,
there might not even be much fixed cost investment.... link together Twilio
and a website for example), you are probably making money at $10 a month per
customer. So it doesn't really matter that fax usage may be decreasing...there
are still lots of people using fax machines and you make more money than it
costs you to run the service.

My point with the mail pickup thing was that they could never make it scale.
Their costs will kill them in the short and long term...even if they get a lot
of customers. That is why the e-fax service works and the mail service
doesn't.

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mahmud
This is a mass credit and identity theft waiting to happen.

First of all, they're not gonna be able to do the collection themselves, they
will contract it out. Then any contractor has power over all the mailboxes
under their management. The contractors, their employees, or anyone who
reverse engineers any single route & collection times can carry out mass
credit applications, online shopping and everything.

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aroman
This is truly some next-level stuff. Very compelling price, and it seems like
a very well thought out revamp of an existing paradigm.

Obvious concerns:

    
    
      - security
      - confidentiality
      - how easy is this to set up? to cancel?
      - how timely is this?
      - how accurate?

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saurik
In addition to not using the anti-credibility keyword "beautiful", Earth Class
Mail (which I currently am using) seems to be a much more useful service
offering (as it doesn't rely on people attempting to obtain your mail from
your current address, nor does it rely on the idea that your current address
even has relevance or permanence).

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signed0
It seems like a lot of work for them to swing by your physical address
multiple times a week.

The other services that do this allow you to have mail delivered to a mailbox
that the company controls and then mail that you actually want can be forward
to your home mailbox.

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csharpminor
When I first read this, I was thinking, "Wow, cool idea!". Now I feel kind of
sad – the need for this service really highlights the inefficiency and waste
of paper mail.

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brianbreslin
I'd be curious if USPS could acquire them (they still have resources), and
then roll out this service much faster? I'd pay $5-10/month for this from
USPS.

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frankdenbow
similar to EarthClassMail which had a documentary: www.hulu.com/start-up-
junkies

