One glaring omission in the list of services that have been transformed by the Internet: postal mail.
A start-up, Outbox, is trying to change that by digitizing your mail. For $5 a month, you can skip trips to the mailbox and sorting and recycling your mail, and instead view and organize all your correspondence on an app and do away with junk mail with the swipe of a finger.
The Postal Service is particularly vulnerable, mired in debt, ending Saturday delivery and desperate for change.
Outbox is starting small. It has been operating in Austin, Tex., where the company is based, and this week expanded to San Francisco.
“From anywhere, anytime, you have exposure to your postal mail for the first time, in really a way that the postal netwrk should be constructed in the 21st century,†said Will Davis, co-founder of Outbox, who calls the Postal Service the original social network.
With the app, going through your mail becomes easier and more convenient. Your letters and envelopes are picked up from your mailbox and scanned so they’re accessible on a pretty app. You can unsubscribe from junk mail, file mail in virtual folders to look up later and form to-do lists for responding to time-sensitive mail.
E-mail is broken, Mr. Davis and his co-founder, Evan Baehr, said, which is one reason that only about one-fifth of people choose to receive bills electronically. That is why they built an app for users to interact with postal mail separately from their in-boxes.
If there is a piece of mail you want physically, whether it’s the J. Crew catalog or a hand-drawn card from your niece, you can ask Outbox to deliver it. Otherwise, Outbox shreds and recycles it.
It all sounds very elegant for the user, but things get ! much more complicated from the company’s perspective. Outbox spent months interviewing 100 families about their habits and desires regarding mail.
Identity theft can occur when thieves dig through recycling bins and steal paper mail. So how can you protect yourself when you are paying someone to fetch your mail and open it Outbox’s founders said the company carefully screens employees, even doing credit checks to make sure they do not have a motive to steal a customer’s identity, and has a $1 million insurance policy to protect customers if its safeguards don’t work. Digitized mail is on a secure site and paper mail is shredded.
For now, Outbox sends employees call “unpostmen†door-to-door to physically gather your mail and take it to a warehouse. (If your mailbox has a lock, you send them a photo of your key and they re-create it, a technical feat of its own.)
The idea of sending people door-to-door seems impossible to expand nationally. That is why Outbox is starting in densecities, the founders said, and doing pickups just three days a week.
Its master plan is to partner with companies that send mail, like retailers and cable companies, or with the Postal Service. Then, catalogs, bills and other mail could be sent directly to Outbox.
In rural places where Outbox can’t afford to operate, people would at least have much less mail in their mailboxes because most would be digital, Mr. Davis said.
Mr. Davis and Mr. Baehr met at Harvard Business School and worked in Washington, where they said they developed the urge to try to solve big bureaucratic problems more quickly than bureaucracies do.
They talked to the Postal Service before starting, they said, but it moved too slowly for them.
