Outbox Is Shutting Down

Spam in your e-mail that is slightly annoying but not terribly terrible outside of excess bit and bytes on the net... Senate gets involved.

Spam in your real mail box which even at a quick glace effects:

- waste management resources

- recycling resources

- extra work for USPS (sorting, shipping, delivery)

- extra weight == more gasoline required

- environmental issues (litter, printing chemicals, trees = cut down)

And that is probably just the tip of the ice-berg on actual impact... nope, not an issue, this is how we make money.

I've had a problem with this for years, but there is no way to fix it besides charging the producers of such "mail" an arm and a leg.

Maybe we should push for the death of "Mailbox Neutrality"... or wait, should we support it so they'll kill it off?...

/rant

The USPS employs 522,144 [1] voting humans who depend on junk mail for paychecks and pensions; email considerably fewer.

Edit: source [1] http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-facts/#H1

I am a current customer of Outbox and also a customer of VirtualPostMail (VPM) for both personal and business mail. And I am a former EarthClassMail (ECM) and PayTrust customer.

Since many seem to be asking about alternatives, I have generally positive views about VPM and ECM. They get the job done, though neither of them will blow your socks off from a technology standpoint (e.g., search, image resolution). I used ECM for 2 1/2 years and then switched to VPM, which I've been using for the last 2 1/2 years. VPM is considerably less expensive than ECM (which probably targets pricing for SMBs rather than consumers).

For reasons I can't grasp, I consider dealing with physical mail one of the most undesirable "life maintenance" activities imaginable. In 2000, I started using paymybills.com (became Paytrust/Intuit) -- basically VPM for bills only plus online bill pay. I paid ~$10/month and easily would have paid double that. I emailed them around 2001 and suggested they expand to provide the same service for all mail. When Intuit acquired Mint, I emailed Aaron Patzer a suggestion that they look into doing to mail what Mint did for financial information. He put me in touch with a product manager he said was looking into this, but apparently it never went anywhere.

When I heard about ECM, I signed up for their service in a heartbeat. It wasn't perfect, but I considered their service to be (barely) worth the $800-$1000/year I paid them. When I learned about VPM, I quickly switched to them and remain a generally happy customer and average about $200/year in fees.

Similarly, I signed up for Outbox the instant I heard of it, wanting to test it out on the trickle of mail I still get at home to see if it might be an improvement on VPM. The one thing I never got from Outbox was peace of mind that they would be around for the long haul, so I thankfully never cancelled my VPM service. I sent Outbox an email in March 2013 inviting them to charge more because I knew today's announcement was inevitable if they did not make some fundamental changes. I never understood why they wouldn’t scan bulk mail I wanted open (you had to have it delivered). But I was cheering for them and am sad to see it come to an end.

[Edit: typo]

I used to work for one of the Commercial Mail Receiving Agencies (CMRA) as defined by the Form 1583. Here's a non-comprehensive list:

myus.com, earthclassmail.com, usglobalmail.com, bongous.com, usamail1.com, maillinkplus.com, usa2me.com, usabox.com, reship.com and probably 50 or so other.

The google keywords you want to search with are "mail forwarding" or "international mail forwarding" or "virtual mailbox" to get started. Not all of them offer pictures of the mail or scanning, but some of them definitely do.

It's a REALLY fractured industry because there's essentially zero M&A activity. The Form 1583 is a giant pain to fill out and it ties you to a specific both company and address. Furthermore if you decide to switch from one to another you can't take advantage of the USPS' normal "fill out this form to get your mail forwarded" feature because as far as the USPS is concerned that's the CMRA's problem, not theirs.

In fairness to the USPS it's a really tough task to determine not only what address mail is going to but what person's name (and box/suite/apt/whatever number) it's going to at that address. Then once you figure that out, you have to figure out if that's one of the probably 500 people who are on the "forward" list at any given time. I know because I built a system to that and more for the company I worked at and it wasn't foolproof. So if it can't be automated easily the only alternative is to have the postal worker on the route do it. Where I worked we got many thousands of letters a day, it would have taken our mailman/woman half a day or longer to go through everything trying to match recipients up against the list of 500 people who want forwarding.

Not in startupland it isn't. pg's hockey stick growth and all that.