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Comment by cjoh | Hacker News Reader

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) -- they just opted not to take it. That's not the USPS's fault.

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If I'm reading the article correctly, they did this from the very start:

"It was around this point that they became vulnerable by their own success. The local Austin, TX and San Francisco, CA Post Offices allowed individuals to sign forwarding contracts to have their mail forwarded to Outbox with the intention of it being opened and scanned – without these agreements Outbox’s market model wouldn’t be possible. In practice there are many types of forwarding contracts that the Post Office allows, so these contracts were not necessarily unusual. Further, there were no reports of complaints by customers. These were all customers who wanted their mail to be forwarded, opened and scanned by Outbox."

This paragraph is referring to mail forwarding, not mail agency; this is just the simple form used to divert your mail to another destination, and which is only supposed to be used temporarily. The form that is required to have someone else receive mail on your behalf is a much more "complex" form in that it requires you to sign it with a notary public and then dispatch to various parties in multiple copies, rather than just stopping at your local post office branch.

Consider that the forward approach was basically trying to dump the cost of rerouting the mail - which was expensive enough that it ate Outbox's runway - onto the USPS.

There are 2 problems with using mail forwarding.

1. It can take up to a month or two for mail to switch over in USPS routing 2. It can only be used for short periods of time (consumers have to renew once a year) 3. It's a terrible user experience and obviously Outbox focused on that immensely

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?

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.

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

I live on 3 continents and my life would't be possible without https://www.postscanmail.com/ Much cheaper then Earth Class Mail.

Yea, but they give you a PO Box, which can be troublesome for certain purposes.

Virtual Post Mail has a street address and is much cheaper.

I have a street address in Anaheim CA

I use VirtualPostMail. I'm on the cheapest plan, $10/month, plus an average of maybe $5 for forwarding certain things. I don't get much mail, though.

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