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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?

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 :/.

I've been using an ECM competitor[1] for about 3 years and, like saurik, I've not run into this problem with either my banks or the IRS. The USPS does provide that data, but to my knowledge it doesn't come as part of the standard address verification APIs.

1. http://www.virtualpostmail.com

I also use a service like this on all my bank accounts (4 different bank accounts in the US), companies etc. I do not hide the fact that it is a post box with the bank, I just tell them this fact, so I don't see any issue with this. All the mail is scanned and then forwarded to another location or trashed, whatever I prefer.

I think receiving physical mail is insane.

I do all of this for my US businesses, and it's essential to do it this way as I don't live in the US so I would never be there to collect the mail in any case!

In any case there are lots of alternatives to outbox!

I use my VirtualPostMail address for just about everything (except the DMV, homeowners/auto insurance, and voter registration) and haven't had any problems so far. Now that I think about it, my health insurance doesn't know my real address. I should probably fix that...

It does help that my virtual address is in the same state as my real address, so things that depend on states work correctly. Without that, I'd probably have to give my real address to more places and encounter more confusion.

The most annoying thing in general is having to fill in separate billing and shipping addresses whenever I buy something online, because of course my billing address is the virtual address. I've had a couple of stores require a phone call to complete an order with separate billing/shipping addresses.

I've been using a similar service (at USABox.com) since 2006 or so; I forward the US mail I haven't discarded to France when I need it, usually once every couple of months. This was the cheapest option for what I wanted to do, when I chose them... there were already several other options at the time.

No problems with the post office or anyone else.

I admit I don't understand why Outbox didn't fall back to this model rather than shutting down (though obviously it's more of a hassle for customers switching all mail to them); though admittedly they would have competitors.

This sounds exactly like what Outbox was described as doing in the article until USPS shut them down. Is there some difference I'm missing? Otherwise Earth Class Mail seems equally vulnerable to being shut down if they become too popular.

ECM gives you a separate mailing address while Outbox picked up/rerouted your mail from your existing address.

I wonder why Outbox didn't go this route?

If USPS declined to honour re-routing rules to Outbox, then why not just give customers an 'address' at an Outbox depot? USPS would have no choice but to deliver to Outbox (with no other address available), and it would also cut down on spam which isn't directly addressed to the customer.

Seems like a much more sensible solution than 'undelivering' mail.

The article states that they initially tried to do this with mail forwarding contracts, but those really aren't designed for this kind of use case (more on this in another one of my comments[1]). To accept mail on behalf of someone else requires a much more complex signup process: you have to get a special form from the postoffice signed in the presence of a notary public and then send that in physical copies to various parties; to get mail forwarded is much simpler. Earth Class Mail tries to help you with this, but as a happy user I honestly had kept putting off signing up due to it: I imagine these services could easily have many more customers if they didn't need such a "hard" form.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7668877

I imagine, then, that it primarily comes down to this attempt to minimize the perceived pain of the signup process: specifically, the idea that you have to move all of your mail senders to a new address is really off-putting to potential customers; it is effectively like moving from your current home "to" the other provider. I was myself a little against doing this at first, and in fact only came around when I finally physically moved to a new apartment and realized "omg, this is so annoying, and I am not even certain I like my new place, so maybe I'll move again in a few years... I'm going to do this once to ECM instead and maybe then I won't have to do this for another decade".

At that point you first look at mail forwarding, and then fall back to "undeliver" while you attempt to argue people into submission that mail forwarding should let you do what you want, or try to get the government to pay you to replace their existing service with yours ;P. But to try to say "our service is so easy: all you do is contact anyone who ever sends you mail, and have them all send mail to us instead! then, if you ever get tired of paying us to receive your mail, you get to do this all over again!" is a really difficult sell, especially for a "hip" "web 2.0" company. I almost want to say they had no other option but the path they took (and no other option than the resulting failure).

To be even more explicit than tlrobinson's answer, they were trying to do long-term forwarding contracts before "falling back" to the painful "undeliver" model. The issue is that the USPS forwarding services are only meant to be used temporarily: they involve a cost to the USPS, and the longest contract you normally can obtain caps out at one year; by default I think you only get six months, in fact. They are really designed for two use cases: "I've moved permanently, but need some time to change all of my upstream addresses" and "I'm temporarily stationed at a different location, but will be back at my house within a month or two". ECM doesn't rely on the USPS in this fashion: your mail is delivered directly to them. I thereby would not be at all worried about the USPS getting angry at them: this article had simply not really highlighted the true point of contention involved.

What's really silly, frankly, about Outbox is that they clearly didn't do any due diligence before trying to start that company: somewhere around 2007/2008 is when I was first interested in getting a service like this for my mail. At the time, I thought "hey, maybe I could just forward my mail to this service". I saw you could forward mail, but it seemed like it was for temporary use. My response was not "well, let's see how long I can get away with this": I called the USPS, and within the hour of talking to various people, I was forwarded to the office of the Postmaster General. Now, I didn't talk to "the man himself", but I talked to one of his assistants. I seriously think I started this call path using 1-800-ASK-USPS, the phone number my friends and I would tell jokes to each other about how awesome it would be if the USPS were willing to answer entirely random questions ;P.

I explained my use case, and they explained to me that they were not able to offer this service for me, told me the reasons they did offer forwarding, explained why my use case did not fall into this, and was willing to brainstorm with me other options. I actually remember them suggesting hiring a personal assistant to undeliver my mail ;P. In the end, I finally decided (though I didn't get around to it for a long time later) to just "commit" and move all of my mail to ECM and forsake my address: frankly, this was the better option for me. I can see how this creates "market friction", though, for a service that is trying to "convert everyone" like Outbox. I thereby understand why a "hip" "web 2.0" company is instead going to look for something really really easy, like doing the mail forwarding path. What I don't understand is the "disruptive" attitude, however, towards getting what you want.

In this case, rather than call the USPS like I did as a mere user in 2008, they seemed to have just started signing up customers with mail forwarding for their new business idea. Well, that kind of sucks: the USPS doesn't want to offer that service. Now, some might think "those meanies don't want to do this" and paint a picture of corruption and bribery, implicating services like bulk mail as the cause of the problem, but if we try to think from the USPS's perspective for a moment: they are designed around this goal of moving mail to the address on the envelope... 99.99999% of their customers need that service, not a service that uses addresses as routing codes to redirect mail to some company. Their mail forwarding infrastructure is thereby expensive to use and maintain: why should Outbox get to use that service for free to make their business easier to operate?

So, yeah: I don't think anyone is concerned about the service ECM is offering. They seem to be offering a service that has been supported in some fashion for many decades now (again, it is reasonably equivalent to services that collected mail for people who lived in RVs, traveling the country without any kind of fixed or firm address), they aren't adding cost to the USPS in the way Outbox was, and they don't seem to have ever "made an enemy of the USPS" as Outbox seemed to consider core to their mission statement. I mean, even in their dying throws, they seem to feel like a Derek Khanna hatchet job against the Postmaster General is an appropriate next step... I will claim that this is a kind of "disruptive" attitude that makes it very difficult to actually "disrupt" anything ;P maybe there was some way to work with the USPS, maybe involving paying the USPS (as opposed to licensing stuff to the USPS, as if it had inherent value) would have worked for them? It sounds like they didn't even really try to go in that direction :/.

This sums it up well. Outbox clearly didn't do their due diligence and seemed to just hope for the best without thinking through the logical implications of how the one entity they depended on would react.

I think this poorly-written hack job article is also a nice cover for a failed business model.

And just to drive home the point, here's a comment I made a year ago about the (un-) feasibility of their business model:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5822869

Now it's true that these economics came after the Post Office "forced them" to do house-to-house "undelivery", but failing to anticipate these contingencies is simply a lack of adequate planning.

I think the founder thought his White House connections would take care of everything. Live by the bureaucracy, die by the bureaucracy.

As a business, it's pretty easy to have your mail (and packages) delivered to a "private post office" but that becomes your official mailing address and you notify the senders that you've had an address change.

This. Earth Class Mail is an amazing service. It has none of the disruptiveness, but is simply useful and "just works".

There was a show pilot on them on Mojo TV (now defunct?) - http://www.mojohd.com/mojoseries/startupjunkies/about.jsf

As a fellow Earth Class Mail customer, really glad to see this. I, for one, am afraid that they'll one day shut down because they're not "hip" enough or are not "growth hacking."

But I sure hope not. They provide a very reliable service for me while I'm spending the years travelling abroad.

FWIW, the trick to how their service works legally is USPS Form 1583 ("Application for Delivery of Mail Through Agent".) This means that you still technically need another address for USPS itself to know as your "real" address, even if mail actually gets delivered to ECM or another service. To be clear, no mail forwarding takes place, my mail goes directly to ECM.

having seen the price increases as a user over the past four years, I can't imagine them shutting down for any reason. they should be sleeping on a bed of cash (I hope)

Sounds like a great service, and I really want something like this. But I'm not on the road for long enough stretches for it to make sense. It's basically twice as expensive as my PO box just to throw everything away, and $1.50 a pop to scan doesn't work considering the amount of things I get and don't mind scanning while watching TV.

ECM is not the only player in this space; someone else here (HN user spacehome) was evaluating a service called Mailbox Forwarding (started in 2010, still years before Outbox) that has lower pricing that maybe you would find a better price-to-value?

http://www.mailboxforwarding.com/pricing.php

I've had a good experience with Virtual Post Mail ( http://virtualpostmail.com/ ) - And they have a $10/month plan with 5 free scans and $1 each after that.

I'm in the market for one of these services, but Earth Class Mail seems rather pricey. If you don't mind me asking, why did you pick Earth Class Mail over cheaper providers like Mailbox Forwarding (mailboxforwarding.com)?

Primarily, Mailbox Forwarding did not exist when I was first looking into this kind of service; and when I got serious and finally decided to move to such a service, Mailbox Forwarding had only just launched, so I probably would not have considered them (the last thing I need is to switch to a service just to have them go out of business a year later).

That said, I decided to take the time just now to evaluate this service vs ECM. To start with, ECM feels like a more "established" option, having existed for just over twice as long; it also has many more locations, and the fact that it is more expensive is reassuring to me: they have managed to operate this business at a higher margin shows solidity.

On features, I use ECM for both my personal mail and for my business; with business mail I have multiple recipients (as mail might come to one of my business partners at the company's address), and we all have separate logins to view mail. (In practice, though, we don't really ever use these features, and I'm the only person who checks the mail.)

ECM is definitely more expensive than Mailbox Forwarding, though: to get the exact service I want (which involves a street address in Los Angeles) I'd need to pay $30/mo with Mailbox Forwarding and $50/mo with ECM. But frankly, $20/mo is not the kind of difference I am going to spend time optimizing: that's like one day of one server on Amazon EC2.

I then have to wonder "is there some difference in how they run their business that helps account for the price difference", and in fact Earth Class Mail offers tech support with live people, both over the phone and in person. If you have an issue with Mailbox Forwarding you must use an online ticket system, and then get an answer a couple days later.

https://www.earthclassmail.com/Contact

http://www.mailboxforwarding.com/support/knowledgebase.php?a...

FWIW, I am really not trying to say to anyone "ECM is the best competitor in this space", just "ECM is a much better option than Outbox ever seemed to be". When I first saw Outbox I was surprised anyone paid any attention to it at all: it wasn't a drastically new idea, and there were tons of competitors that seemed to be working off a better model.

Even now I'm somewhat surprised: people are responding to this article here on HN talking about how they are confused as to why Outbox didn't just offer an address to which people could deliver, and expect that there must be some reason they didn't do that as otherwise it seems obvious... well, that's what other companies were doing for a long time before? ;P

I use ECM because they will automatically deposit received checks into your bank account.

For consultants/contractors/freelancers, this is heaven. We can be away from home for weeks on end, and we don't have to worry about when client checks come in.

How well does this work for packages?

Especially in the case when I ask for something to be shipped via UPS, and they "outsource" is to the USPS for the last part of the delivery?

If you get a real street address from ECM AFAIK it doesn't matter. "Street addresses generally accept items from all carriers. PO Boxes accept items from the USPS only. Check our address page for details." "If you plan to receive mail or parcels from carriers other than USPS, be sure to choose from our addresses that accept all carriers."