
Outbox vs. USPS: How the Post Office Killed Digital Mail  - ilamont
http://www.insidesources.com/outbox-vs-usps-how-the-post-office-killed-digital-mail/
======
krallja
Anti-Post Office hatchet job:

> So having worked on the Hill they knew of the USPS’s well-documented
> inefficiencies. As they describe it, they “knew that the USPS would not be
> able to work out its own problems, so perhaps naively, we hoped to partner
> with USPS to provide an alternative to the physical delivery of postal mail
> to a subset of users, hoping this would spur further innovation and cost
> savings.”

The Post Office is insanely efficient. The only reason it has budget problems
is because Congress causes the budget problems.
[http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/09/28/330524/postal-
no...](http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/09/28/330524/postal-non-crisis-
post-office-save-itself/)

~~~
rescripting
Are you sure about that? It seems like there is nothing 'insanely efficient'
about physically sending paper across the country when the recipient has
indicated that no, you actually don't need to do that.

It's like the USPS has an insanely optimized implementation but inefficient
algorithm for delivering mail. Change the algorithm and you can throw all your
micro optimizations out the window.

The important quote from the article is this one:

> ‘You mentioned making the service better for our customers; but the American
> citizens aren’t our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our customers. Your
> service hurts our ability to serve those customers.‘

This sure makes it sound like the USPS isn't so much a 'public good' as it is
a private, tax payer funded business whose primary business model is
advertising.

~~~
msandford
I don't think you understand how junk mail works. There are a few hundred
companies in the US who print junk mail. They are located in the cities that
the junk mail will eventually be delivered in. They receive huge discounts to
pre-sort the mail by zip code and palletize it in such a way as to cleanly
slip into the USPS's system at the last possible logistic point. It might cost
a regular human being $0.49 to send a letter. A presort mailer might pay $0.12
or $0.09 or $0.07 (or less) to send a letter. But that's because the USPS
provides only the last mile rather than cross-country transport.

The reason this revenue stream is so important to the USPS is logistics,
overhead vs marginal cost. As long as you're delivering a couple of pieces of
mail to each house every day you can price those items marginally. Average
Mail Per Address (AMPA) needs to be at least 3-5 for the USPS's pricing to
work. If everyone opted out of junk mail AMPA would drop into a range more
like 0.5-1.5 and then there's proportionally much less in the way of marginal
cost and it's all the overhead of driving/walking from one address to the
next. And then the USPS has to change all the pricing to go up by 200% or more
and that'll never fly in Congress.

The other problem is that reducing the mail volume by 50%-90% would result in
massive layoffs of workers (which won't look good for Congress) and it would
reduce influence and power for those in charge of things. Few people ever
willingly accept their diminishing importance.

I'm not in favor of the USPS continuing to assault my mailbox with junk mail.
But I don't think there's any hope of things getting fixed until they have
such an awful year that mail stops for a while and Congress reforms their
mandate. I give it maybe 20% odds of happening in the next decade.

~~~
MichaelGG
How long has the USPS been an ad-supported company?

~~~
encoderer
Brilliant insights -- both you and GP.

The USPS is the original ad-supported service where _you_ are the customer.
Mind blown.

~~~
kansface
You meant "you are the product".

------
pessimizer
“You mentioned making the service better for our customers; but the American
citizens aren’t our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our customers. Your
service hurts our ability to serve those customers.”

The article blows right past this like it's insignificant. Junk mailers sort
their own mail, drop ship it to the local BMC, and pay the post office for the
privilege. This subsidizes the regular mail. If you can get rid of junk mail
with a mouse click, it's not worth it.

The post office getting upset about ways to prevent junk mail from being
delivered is just like a website complaining about Adblock.

~~~
wpietri
The interesting thing here to me is how people get captured by business
models.

The post office started out as an important public service. "Neither snow nor
rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift
completion of their appointed rounds." The post office is mentioned in the US
Constitution because at the time it was immensely important.

But after enough time in bed with the junk mailers, they've abandoned all but
a pretense of that. And it shows. They shifted from serving American citizens
as a duty to serving American citizens on a platter. It happened inch by inch,
I'm sure, but now they're trapped.

Let that be a lesson to anybody who's starting a business: choose your
business model wisely, because over time it will win out over everything else.

~~~
kevinchen
The USPS is still important. For example, no private carrier has a
Constitutional mandate to serve all Americans. They are essential for rural
communities: for example, if you need medication but there's no pharmacy
nearby, the USPS will deliver it to your house even if UPS and FedEx won't.

Also, the USPS kicks everyone's ass in time and cost when it comes to
delivering small packages. For a 12-oz package from NY to SF, USPS delivers in
3 days for about $2 while FedEx and UPS start at ~5 days and $10.

~~~
Fomite
I've also never had USPS hold a package because it got to me too quickly, and
I've _absolutely_ had commercial carriers do that to maintain artificial
separation between service tiers.

------
cjoh
What's wrong with this story is that Outbox didn't want to do the one thing
that would keep it in business: make its customers fill out a form that allows
a third party to accept mail on their behalf. There are plenty of businesses
digitizing mail right now -- travelingmailbox.com, earthclassmail.com, amongst
others. Why Outbox.com refused to go this route and instead decided to go out
of business was their decision. There was a workaround
([http://travelingmailbox.com/usps-
form-1583-ca](http://travelingmailbox.com/usps-form-1583-ca)) -- they just
opted not to take it. That's not the USPS's fault.

~~~
ma2rten
Since I came to US, I've been thinking about actually using one of those.
These providers seem much cheaper than their equivalents in Europe. Does
anyone here have experience with any of those providers?

~~~
rubyrescue
I use Earthclassmail extensively. It can be expensive.

However, it provides some incredibly valuable services. Mail scanning is
great, but check deposit is better. However, it's only worth it if you really
need a US address, move a lot, or have enough mail or check volume to justify
$80/month.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I assume you write that $80/month off as a business expense, correct?

------
jstalin
I presumed this story was going to be about the USPS monopoly on first-class
mail and would involve an armed raid to shut down competition, as has happened
in the past.

"The monopoly is well enforced. The USPS can conduct searches and seizures if
it suspects citizens of contravening its monopoly. For example, in 1993, armed
postal inspectors entered the headquarters of Equifax Inc. in Atlanta. The
postal inspectors demanded to know if all the mail sent by Equifax through
Federal Express was indeed "extremely urgent," as mandated by the Postal
Service's criteria for suspension of the Private Express Statutes. Equifax
paid the Postal Service a fine of $30,000. The Postal Service reportedly
collected $521,000 for similar fines from twenty-one mailers between 1991 and
1994."

[http://www.aei.org/papers/economics/opportunities-for-
antico...](http://www.aei.org/papers/economics/opportunities-for-
anticompetitive-behavior-in-postal-services/)

------
throaway1984
I call BS on this article. We're not getting the full story. (Using a
throwaway account since I'm travelling, and on a public computer; this article
pissed me off so much that I had to respond right away)

Background: I used to work for a research lab which got a majority of its
funding from USPS. Worked there for ~10 years. Interacted with the USPS
engineering folks in Merrifield, VA very closely. I can assure you: the USPS
has some very good engineers (in the true "engineer" sense of the word). None
of them would call digital "a fad". Not one.

Now, to the article: "but the American citizens aren’t our customers—about 400
junk mailers are our customers." .... wrong! No postal employee will call it
"junk mail". They all call it "bulk mail". I know, because I was corrected
myself. :-)

"Digital is a fad"... wrong again. At one time, the USPS was the largest user
of Linux; all of their mail sorting machines were running OCR on Linux boxes
(they also were a huge SGI shop, with racks and racks of Octanes and O2s).
Today, when mail cannot be sorted automatically, its image is sent to a remote
data-entry site, where operators enter the address by hand. See the
fluorescent barcode at the back? That's used to tag the mail and barcode it
later, all digitally.

And finally: we, in our research lab, actually had proposed this "Outbox"
style electronic mail forwarding to them back in 1998 or 1999 (the Internet
was new). I don't remember the details, but there were some legal issues
surrounding it that prevented it from taking off. Remember: the USPS is
governed by laws (passed by Congress) that were written around the time of Ben
Franklin. Fun fact: the average speed of letter sorting by hand (800 pcs/hour)
was established by Ben himself, and is still the target for manual sorting.

Plus: I doubt the PMG would become personally involved in such small nonsense.

I know everyone wants to make fun of USPS; but for the price, they do a
phenomenal job. People want them to compete with "the market", but don't
realize that the USPS' hands are tied: they can't raise rates without approval
from the Postal Rate Commission; they can't close post offices that have no
customers; etc. etc. After the Civil War, when Congress wanted to give the
veterans jobs, where did it send them? To the Post Office! I've heard (rumor)
that even today, the USPS cannot use your discharge status against you for a
job.

~~~
don_draper
They drop junk at my house every day without any easy way to opt out. Do they
deserve scorn? Absolutely.

~~~
freehunter
Apparently, they drop bulk at your door every day. Not junk.

------
quinndupont
I was reading with great interest until I came to the heading about
"disruption" at DC. Defending "ask later" practices is neither disruptive in
the proper sense, nor particularly ethical.

The reporting here attempts to paint a picture of a slow, outdated USPS (and
they surely are, to some extent) by way of obviously false comments ("digital
is a fad"? Really? I'm supposed to believe someone at the USPS actually said
this, in context? Let's critique the USPS, but let's not fabricate silly
positions.)

Too bad, really, it sounds like a great idea and excellent technology, but
marred by a shameful ideology.

~~~
michaelt

      "digital is a fad"? Really? I'm supposed to believe 
      someone at the USPS actually said this, in context?
    

I agree it's unbelievably that anyone would say digital is a fad, but
digitisation of physical postal mail might be a fad; it'll last as a market
only as long as recipients want their letters digitally, but senders insist on
sending physical mail.

Haven't all the senders caught up already? All my bills etc are electronic
these days, and very few people send letters in the age of e-mail. Amazon
purchases I don't want digitised. Maybe christmas and birthday cards?

~~~
XorNot
This sounds much more likely, and would as you say, be a completely accurate
statement.

Mail that can be digitized will eventually be digitized by its senders,
whereas stuff that can't, well, that isn't changing.

I know in Australia the bulk of the mail I receive these days is ebay orders
from overseas - my bills are digital, my statements are digital. The physical
things that go in regular envelopes tend are stuff like new credit cards or
registered mail like my passport of things.

So yeah, it does seem like an implicitly shrinking space.

------
lgbr
What's strange is, USPS actually seems to be aware of such services and
perhaps endorses them. When I signed up for Virtual Post Mail, and proceeded
to setup a mail forward on the USPS website, I got this message:

> Our records indicate that this address is a commercial mail receiving agency
> (CMRA). If you are forwarding your mail to a CMRA, please enter your private
> mailbox number (PMB) below.

So what did Outbox do to upset USPS?

Becuase what I fear is that my mail scanning service will suffer the same fate
as Outbox, and suddenly leave me without a way to get mail. I don't live in
the US anymore, but I'm still a citizen, I still pay taxes, and I still own
property there. Without mail scanning there is no feasible way for someone in
my position to receive my mail. How is the water company going to let me know
that my bill is past due? How is the city going to let me know that my
property taxes have changed? This isn't just a nuissance, this makes it
impossible for me to do business in my own country.

~~~
Spooky23
You have a contract with a third party to receive your mail. I don't think
they care about that.

Sounds like Outbox wanted to divert mail being delivered to one physical
address to another for individuals.

~~~
garrettgrimsley
I don't think that the point at which the mail is diverted is the issue here.

The article leads me to believe that the USPS took issue with mass-
unsubscribing from junk-mail, not with having mail diverted before reaching
the addressee.

~~~
Spooky23
The article was written from the POV of the guy who blew through alot of
investor money on an idea that wasn't really thought through.

The USPS has a legal obligation to provide universal service to every physical
address. They unsuccessfully tried to hack around it, while ignoring the
multitude of solutions available to do so in a real (but perhaps inconvenient
to them) way.

------
misterbwong
I may be being too naive, but what's to stop a startup like outbox from
opening up a digital version of Mailboxes Etc?

Instead of forwarding mail from current addresses or physically picking up
mail from peoples' mailboxes, they'd get a new address managed by the
digitization service.

~~~
forgottenpass
I was thinking the same thing as I read the article, they MUST have had that
idea, right? There must have been something preventing that model from
working, why else would they try something as insane as "undelivering" mail.

~~~
chime
It's just like a PO box. You can use it for most casual things but the hassles
aren't worth it for services that require proof of physical address like
driver's license, bank accounts, mortgages etc. Also using non-physical
address for personal transactions raises your fraud score. E.g. your credit
card goes to a PO and you ask vendors to ship to your physical address that
may not even be in the same zip code or city.

The true benefit of a service like Outbox is that I don't miss important
paperwork like auto registration and home insurance renewals. But the more
important the service, the more stringent the requirements of proving you live
at the physical address on file. I own a rental property and it is a pain to
make sure all the bills and paperwork related to the property come to my
primary residence. Yet I keep finding mail from different companies going to
the rental address even though I have set the Billing / Contact address to my
primary residence. Companies just do a "SELECT address, city, state, zip" when
doing a mail merge, which usually brings up the physical address instead of
the billing / contact address.

~~~
saurik
Earth Class Mail does this. They offer real street addresses as opposed to "PO
boxes", so you don't run into a lot of the issues you are describing. The only
thing that occasionally is a problem (but like, once in a blue moon, and
usually related to buying a new iPhone) is the issue with "having a physical
good sent to an address other than my billing address". However, while I've
usually been able to just temporarily change my upstream AT&T address for just
the day to make my order, ECM also solves this problem: you can have physical
packages delivered to your ECM street address and then have the product
forwarded or even go pick it up in person the same day (I live two hours away
from ECM, so I'm unlikely to do this often, but I technically can in a pinch).

I have my ECM address on my drivers license (I didn't even ask the DMV to do
this for me: I simply listed ECM as my mailing address, and that's the address
that their policy puts on the card; I verified with them afterwards there was
no mistake or misunderstanding), and have had no issues with moving my bank
accounts and credit cards to my ECM service. The only people who know my
physical address are utilities (though my bills actually do get sent correctly
to ECM), health insurance (as the pricing is dependent on your location), and
the US government (voting registration and DMV filing, though neither ever
sends mail to anything but ECM).

That all said, your specific use case is somewhat different: you need the
utilities to also send you bills, and they are some of the few people who
actually care about having your physical address. But it isn't like Outbox
could really solve this in a sane way for you either... that would involve
them going through the mail of the people who are renting from you, only once
every three days (so assuming your renters didn't reap the mail first), and
pulling just the mail being delivered to "you" as opposed to them. If I were
renting from you I'd frankly find that kind of sketch. For what misterbwong
and forgottenpass are talking about, however: ECM is specifically the service
they are looking for ;P.

------
taiki
[http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/09/28/330524/postal-
no...](http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/09/28/330524/postal-non-crisis-
post-office-save-itself/)

There's a reason why the post office is going broke, and it's not necessarily
bungling on their part. Blame Congress for this one.

I'm kind of shocked with how stark the PMG was though.

~~~
throaway1984
I really doubt that these chaps talk to the PMG. He has a lot bigger fish to
fry than talk to 2 tech dweebs.

------
saurik
If someone wants a service like this, in my opinion Earth Class Mail is a
better alternative. They are not in any way "hip" or "web 2.0" and they would
never in a million years talk about "disrupting" some established legal
regime: but frankly, I'm not just "ok" with that, that makes me ecstatic. I
thereby see this "how the post office killed digital mail", a dream I've been
successfully living now for years through one of their "less disruptive"
competitors, and can do nothing but laugh.

Instead, Earth Class Mail is a service that has been in business since 2006
and they operate within the existing legal framework of mail: they are
effectively the kind of service that is required to live in an RV, where a
third-party receives your mail on your behalf. To make this work, you sign
forms _from the post office_ that you send to Earth Class Mail, which are then
kept on file to demonstrate they can legally open your mail. Maybe Outbox used
the same process, maybe they didn't, but this article made it sound like
Outbox is responsible for this legal framework: wrong, the ability to assign
"open my mail" rights has existed for a long time.

Rather than having to have cars driving around attempting to "undeliver" your
mail with some ludicrous three-day delay as Outbox did (at extreme cost to the
service that calls into question whether their business model would even
succeed, a fact mentioned in this article linked today, and limiting them to
only even being able to think about operating in high-density regions of the
country), you simply have your mail delivered to them. You can initially set
this up with your local post office as you work on "moving" to ECM, and you
can even do it temporarily if you just want to try it out (the post office
will happily forward mail for as little as 15 days: again, this is a use case
they actively support).

But frankly it is so amazingly relaxing once you "commit" and outsource your
physical address. I have a lot of friends that move every couple years, and
the idea that they have to change their address at the same time is silly:
that is the most stressful moment to be trying to move mail delivery and you
can't usually overlap the old and new addresses to buffer mistakes. In the
most extreme situations, people who are traveling a lot (for whatever reason;
maybe they have a job that requires them to be in random locations for weeks
on end a lot, or maybe they are just kind of nomadic and stay with friends a
lot as they travel the country) will tell you to send things to their current
location. Outbox sort of helped with this, but the three-day delay sounded
really irritating: ECM just solves this problem outright; you don't even need
a real physical address at all.

Indeed, I seriously have now switched to using my Earth Class Mail address for
everything: my drivers license even has that address on it (and yes, I
verified with the people at the California DMV that there was no issue with
this, and they technically do have my physical address on file; but their
policy is to print the mailing address of the driver on the card), which makes
it really easy for me to never get into an argument with anyone about what my
address is: I effectively now live at Earth Class Mail in Los Angeles. The
only people who know my real address are the US government (DMV and voting
registration, though they happily send my voting materials to ECM), the
power/cable/phone services to my apartment (again, bills go to ECM), and my
health insurance company (they base pricing on where you physically reside).

They offer multiple locations around the country, so you can get an address
vaguely near you or opt for one that "looks good" for your purpose (maybe you
want your startup to look like it has an office in San Francisco, for
example). With some of the addresses they are legitimate "street addresses"
that can receive packages on your behalf, and you can either have the package
forwarded to you or you can go pick it up from them if you need it _now_ and
live near enough to the location. (Though, with packages, I normally just one-
off deliver those to my apartment.) (I wonder if you can have them open the
package and take a picture of the contents... I never asked ;P.)

~~~
clamprecht
Do you have any financial accounts (such as Fidelity in the US) set up using
this address? How do you handle situations when their "compliance" department
says "we have flagged your address as being a mailbox-type-service" and demand
a physical address? Do you just give your physical address instead?

~~~
saurik
As this has not (yet?) happened to me, I cannot really tell you how I handle
the situation: I presume I would give them a physical address instead and keep
them as one of the few people who know where I live. As it stands, my health
insurance provider knows where I live because they truly care (premiums are
different in different locations). I believe I remember my bank actually
putting my ECM address down as my physical residence because that was the
address on my drivers license.

To be clear: I have no issue telling people my physical address; I'm not
trying to hide from people ;P. I just don't want to have to think about
updating addresses ever, and I really don't want to receive mail at my
physical address. Most providers that do ask for physical addresses also ask
for a mailing address, and almost no one mails to the wrong address. I don't
mind having my physical address with my bank, as long as they aren't sending
me critical mail here.

In fact, I think about physical mail so infrequently I seriously just don't
check it at this point. It seriously just occurred to me that I haven't
checked my physical mail in a very long time (well over a month). Let's go
check it! ;P (I actually got a little concerned that I'd fail to find my mail
key, but thankfully I found it without issue.) BTW: I'm pretty certain my
local mail carrier hates bulk mail so much that he just refuses to deliver it
to my address now.

    
    
        1 piece of mail for someone who doesn't live here
        3 cable service bills (autobilled, waste of paper)
        2 heath insurance bills (I pay these online already)
        1 power bill (keep forgetting to autobill... :()
        1 rental insurance bill (I guess, didn't open it)
        2 lawyer bills (they also e-mail these: *sigh*)
        1 notice from AT&T of their new privacy policy
    

So far, none of this is mail that I care about: in fact, most of it is mail I
wish I could "paperless". I can check these a few times a year and it wouldn't
cause me a problem, and it is difficult or impossible for me to not tell them
when I move anyway (utilities, insurance, lawyer). No financial data goes to
my apartment: as I had said before, I don't even think my bank has my physical
address on file anymore, but even if they did I long-ago set them to paperless
for my personal banking statements so it doesn't matter.

I also received:

Google Wallet card -- I asked them to send this to me a few days ago, gave
them my apartment address as I wanted to get it sooner. I did guess it would
arrive in an envelope like this, but it could also have arrived in a package.
I also only ordered it "for fun" and so promptly forgot it would arrive here:
receiving this in another few months would not be an issue.

Trademark Scams -- I have some things that are trademarked; occasionally, I
get official-looking mail that tries to convince me to pay large quantities of
money to random companies to "complete" or "secure" my trademark. In this
case, I received two messages requesting EUR 970 to get listed in the database
ipts-register.com. Fine print: "The registration on our database has not any
connection with an official government organization."

So yeah: I don't use physical mail anymore :/.

------
jrochkind1
Um, the existing industry doesnt use "disruption" negatively because they
"don't speak the same language." Theyuse it negatively because you are talking
quite literally about disrupting their business and probably putting them out
of it.

Not talking about outbox and usps specifically so much as the fetishization of
"disruption" the OP author buys into without question, as if the only reason
to be scared of "disruptio " is a cultural misunderstanding, you're not with
the program. Rather, quite obviously its bad for some existing business
interests -- but also it's certainly possible to challenge the religious
belief that disruptionof markets always leads to better outcomes for consumers
or society as a whole.

~~~
XorNot
No at this point it's used negatively because the silicon valley startup crowd
have been using the word _constantly_ for the past 10 years now, in reference
to every conceivable sector of industry, which, as this article perfectly
highlights, they frequently don't understand in the slightest.

------
Spooky23
They didn't think about the corner cases that are part of mail. What do you do
with Certified Mail? Registered Mail?

Different classes of mail have different security and other business
requirements, and involving some random "disruptive" third party has many
potential consequences.

I'm not sure that I understand why this was necessary for the company anyway.
I subscribed to a service in 1999 that did this -- you had bills sent to a PO
Box and they would scan/PDF everything for you (even ship copies on CD-ROM).
They would also pay your bills for you if desired.

------
al2o3cr
"Maintaining a fleet of vehicles to go to every person’s house every day was
costing them a fortune"

Funny, that's just what the USPS is _constitutionally mandated_ to do (Article
I, Section 8, Clause 7).

~~~
tanzam75
No, the USPS is not constitutionally mandated to deliver to your house.

The Post Office Department did not begin delivering mail to city addresses
until 1863. Rural Free Delivery did not begin until 1893.

Before free delivery, you went to the Post Office yourself and asked for your
mail. ("Caller service" or "General delivery", both of which still exist.)

Since the 1970s, the Postal Service has been delivering to clusterboxes.
Grandfathered areas get to keep their individual mailboxes, but new greenfield
development must be built with clusterboxes.

If mail volume keeps decreasing, we'll see greater contraction in free
delivery. It all depends on how the politics go.

------
Theodores
You do wonder why post offices - everywhere - not just in the US - have not
done something with electronic delivery.

If I was Postmaster General I would like to see a post office ISP that only
accepted mail from government departments, local authorities, banks,
hospitals, doctors, schools and other agencies. From there people could setup
a forwarding address - if people wanted to just check their mail from one
account, e.g. gmail, they could have the 'important stuff' rolled into it. Or
they could setup POP/IMAP.

There could also be a webmail where you would be able to have highest
accessibility standards. Clearly the cryptography would have to be in place so
only the sender and the recipient could read the mail - a 'virtual envelope'.
Naturally there would be tracking tags so they knew if someone had read that
'final demand'.

As a competitive service for banks etc. wanting to send out statements it
could work very nicely. Good for trees, too.

~~~
kalleboo
The Swedish post does it. They already have a "companies electronically send
us a PDF and we print, envelope and mail it to end customers" service, so the
idea is that instead of printing it they can just forward it on to your
electronic postbox. Not many agencies/companies have signed up to use it (only
about 100-200 from the looks of it), so it's still pretty useless to me.
[http://www.posten.se/sv/Privat/epostboxen/Sidor/home.aspx](http://www.posten.se/sv/Privat/epostboxen/Sidor/home.aspx)

There's a separate one run by the Swedish IRS, and I've gotten a few letters
from them to it [http://minameddelanden.se](http://minameddelanden.se)

There's also a private service, but it also suffers from poor support - I
think I've only gotten mail from a credit reporting agency there
[https://www.kivra.com](https://www.kivra.com)

------
DEinspanjer
I've seen several people mention Earth Class mail as a working alternative
here. I am not sure if even their lowest monthly charge would provide enough
value to be worth it for my own use case, but I do have a few questions
regarding it for their users..

Do you still have a mailbox at your home? If so, do you still check it
regularly? If so, do you still receive bulk mail drops from postal carriers in
that mailbox? I'm talking about the ones that typically are addressed to
"Current Resident" and such.

Unless you are in a position that you can confidently forgo ever checking that
mailbox again, it seems that you would still be receiving those and be forced
to deal with them. That would take a lot of the potential out of the service
for me.

------
stellar678
Can't Outbox just provide me with a c/o address, and I can update my address
with anyone who intends to send me mail?

------
bsder
These guys are doing the classic startup shuffle--pick off the profitable
people and leave the some chump (aka the government) with the unprofitable
ones.

Although, I'm a bit skeptical that they couldn't "undeliver" mail profitably
in a city-density area like Austin. Focusing just on businesses and apartment
complexes, $640/mo + mileage gets you a person twice a week, for 8 hours a
day, at $10 an hour. At $5 per month per subscriber you need to collect about
150 subscribers per month to make your nut.

Really? They couldn't get 150 subscribers serviced by 1 person over 8 hours?
Sounds like they didn't control their rollout density or price correctly.

This sounds more like "Waaaaaah, we're only going to be a $20 million company
rather than a $2 billion company. I'm going to have to hang my head in shame
at the next Skull-and-Bones barbeque. We should shut down."

------
rjf1990
>the American citizens aren’t our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our
customer

Yup, I used to work for one of the country's largest mailers, doing direct
mail strategy. Outbox, if it became widespread, would have killed this
marketing channel.

------
bitJericho
This makes no sense. They could have circumvented this by having customers
give out their addresses as: Joe Schmo c/o Outbox PO Box whatever Closest
Outbox Facility, CA 90210

Sounds like some details are missing here.

------
ghshephard
I haven't received physical mail where I live in 15 years. I have all my paper
bills sent to paytrust, who scans them, and then pays them per automated rules
(or allows me to manually approve.) Physical Mail just goes to 650 Castro
Street in Mountain View, where I get a re-mail once a month wherever I am in
the world.

I lived in an apartment for about 18 months, but never asked for a key to my
mailbox as there really was no reason for me to open it.

The only packages I ever need to receive at my place of residence are via
FedEx/UPS.

------
maresca
I hate to be that guy but if you popup a dialog as soon as I visit a site, I
immediately click the back button.

------
lamontcg
Fuck the USPS.

Seriously.

Its been obvious for at least a decade that the customers are direct mail
advertisers and we're the product and we can't really opt out (I've signed up
for a several opt-out services and I still get junk mail).

------
chris123
Seinfeld covered this scenario over a decade ago, complete with visit from
Postmaster General:
[http://youtu.be/JpUqLjjKk4Y?t=3m20s](http://youtu.be/JpUqLjjKk4Y?t=3m20s)

------
jeffbr13
Can anyone vouch for any similar services in Europe (specifically in the UK)?

I change address fairly regularly, as a student, and it'd be great if I could
cut out paper mail entirely.

------
anigbrowl
This is one of the most disingenuous articles I've read in a while. I expected
something a bit more subtle from a Yale alumnus.

 _They believed that their technology could actually save the Post Office
money. If consumers started to opt-in to Outbox, or other services like
Outbox, then the Post Office could receive the full benefits of the stamped
envelope but never have to deliver those packages, which is one of the biggest
costs for the Post Office. In fact, if properly implemented, when a customer
sends a letter from Austin, TX to Alaska, if the Post Office knew that they
weren’t going to receive the letter anyway, then the Post Office could forward
the letter from Austin directly to Outbox, and never have to ship the letter
across the continent._

This, for example, is just laughably wrong. Marginal cost isn't the bugbear of
the USPS; universal service obligations are. As long as there's one person in
Alaska who doesn't want to sign up for digital mail (possibly because they
can't reliably connect to it in Alaska), then the USPS has to fly planes or
sail boats up there to deliver the mail _anyway_. And as Outbox themselves
discovered, moving mail around for individual customers is hideously
expensive. It can be made efficient in cities where there is sufficient
population density, but something like 1/3 of US addresses are on rural routes
and of course delivery to those is more expensive. Even if half the customers
on rural routes sign up for a service like Outbox, there's no promise that
they'll be the ones farthest away from sorting offices, so mail carriers will
need to travel more or less the same routes even if they are serving a lower
number of customers, plus all customers will want packages delivered because
packages have physical rather than purely informational content.
Unfortunately, the profit margin on Package elivery is only about 1/3 that of
first class mail delivery, which continues to decline in volume at about the
same rate that demand for package delivery increases, leaving the USPS in a
now-in situation which requires it to balance the books through cuts rather
than investment and growth for the foreseeable future:
[http://about.usps.com/strategic-planning/five-year-
business-...](http://about.usps.com/strategic-planning/five-year-business-
plan-2012-2017.pdf)

I loathe junk mail with a passion and it really irritates me that I have no
way to opt out from it, that the USPS is required to inefficiently front-load
all its fiscal obligations as if they were payable tomorrow, and a whole bunch
of other things. But by ignoring the legal operating constraints imposed by
Congress on the USPS and the resulting necessity of dealing with bulk mailers,
the author is doing his readers a huge disservice by offering trite solutions
to knotty problems, essentially arguing that the USPS should pick up the costs
of mail forwarding on behalf of a service which reduces the utility (and thus
revenue) of the USPS's largest income stream (bulk delivery).

 _In 2014 Derek was selected for Forbes ' top 30 under 30 list for law and
policy and as a 2014 Global Leader of Tomorrow, for thought leadership and
activism on NSA surveillance and innovation policy._

I'm pretty sure that if the USPS had been offering to open, scan, digitally
archive, and destroy your physical mail for the last decade as Derek says they
should have been, he'd be writing a similarly indignant rant about big
government overreach and the crowding out of private competitors, regardless
of assurances about strict siloing or privacy controls.

------
mcroft
What a WASTE.

~~~
vibrolax
Don't Ever Antagonize The Horn

------
joshuaheard
Did these guys really think a government monopoly that has operated the same
way for over 200 years was going to change their procedures to accommodate
their startup idea?

~~~
Fomite
I was able to get a package sent across the country in three days, delivered
to someone's door, and watch its progress online for $5.60 in 1814?

~~~
joshuaheard
Well, it would take 3 months and your would get your progress by telegraph,
but otherwise, yes.

------
bowlofpetunias
This is such bull. How could any postal service in good conscience (or legally
for that matter) co-operate with a service which consists of opening other
people's mail?

Any postal service should deliver mail to the addressee, unopened and
unchanged. Any deals that put that mail in the hands of third parties should
be a no-go to start with.

And they also shouldn't be offering this themselves. Closed envelopes stay
closed. If that means postal services are not profitable, so be it. That was
never the reason they existed in the first place.

