Zumbox gives your house an e-mail in-box
Zumbox is an interesting e-mail start-up based on the company's capability to create an electronic mailbox for every residential physical address in the United States.
The idea is that companies that send our paper statements--banks, utility companies, and so on--can now send those documents electronically. The benefits include lower environmental impact, security, and archivability of the messages. More importantly, service providers already know their customers' physical addresses. They can start delivering messages to users immediately, instead of trying to gather their customers' e-mail coordinates.
To sign up for the service, consumers go to Zumbox, enter their physical address, and then wait for a physical letter to arrive with their Zumbox PIN. That closes the loop between online user and home address, and is used to unlock their electronic mailbox.
Billing companies don't have to wait for consumers to connect to the service before they start using it. The idea is that they just start sending their electronic print runs of bills and such to Zumbox, which then files messages in mailboxes waiting for consumers to activate their accounts.
Once customers sign into an account, they can then--for each biller sending them statements--optionally turn off the paper delivery they've been getting. Zumbox can alert users' preexisting e-mail accounts when they have new statements ready for them.
The consumer advantage over getting regular e-mail from a biller? It's a central, secure clearinghouse for bills, and it's archived at the Zumbox site. For the biller, the big advantage, as I said, is setup, since they already know their customers' physical addresses.
Zumbox matches real-world physical addresses with users' online coordinates.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET Networks)Zumbox President Glen Ward told me that the service is also secure, to HIPAA and other levels, allowing the safe sending of financial and personal medial information.
The service is free for businesses sending account-based mail, like bills and statements, to customers.
So what's the catch? Commercial mail. Zumbox's customers can also send "special offers" (junk mail to you and me) to subscribers, and not just those whose physical addresses they know. They can blanket entire apartment buildings, or select all addresses within a radius around a given point.
The volume of spam should be kept in check by Zumbox's business model. It charges companies 5 cents per piece of junk--sorry, per special offer--delivered. Users can also opt out of receiving the messages per sender (but not overall).
However, if, like many people, you like getting catalogs in the mail, Zumbox's "offers" service could be a real boon: it lets you get a ton more direct mail without having to hassle with the overflow of paper catalogs. It's also, clearly, a very green solution to mail overload.
Zumbox is clever, and, I think, really useful. But it has a real challenge: it's a middleman business that doesn't become truly valuable for for its for endpoint users (senders and consumers) until there's a critical mass of both. That's a tough slog.
Fortunately for Zumbox, the costs for building out this business are reasonable. Zumbox runs on Amazon's EC2, unlike the very ambitious Earth Class Mail, which needed a giant physical facility to intercept and scan postal mail for its users.
The company has raised $4 million in private (non-venture) funding so far, and Ward says his runway is "as long as we need," even though he plans to start stumping for venture funds in the summer. He also says he has several high-profile senders lined up to start using the service. He wouldn't tell me who they are, but says he'll announce them shortly.
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe. 
I can see one potential pitfall, though....Remembering to look for those bills and junk mail can sometimes be a bit tricky. Today we are all so conditioned to look in our "real" mailbox every day that it's automatic. I get whatever arrived from the USPS that day in my hand and in my face-no missing it. But it is really easy to miss something that you have to log in and look for in order to find it. I know; it's happened to me a number of times already with bills that I currently receive electronically, and the results have been pretty ugly.
If Zumbox can figure out a solid, failsafe solution to that one issue, this service will definitely be a home-run very quickly.
I can change my email amd can acces it anywhere, means on yahoo or on Gmail or in my out look, Or in my corporate exchange server. it's up to me where i wants the emails and here I have to stuck with Zumbox.
Emails also save papers and at least I dont have to get the junk mails b'coz i create dedicated emails for the billers so no question of junk.
But ya earth mail is something very different which forward your physical emails if Zumbox add that kind of service then it's good other wise it's just an another email inbox for me.
- by chrisknight28 October 25, 2009 3:10 PM PDT
- We just started using paperless postal system called NoMorePost.com here in the United Kingdom as there are currently postal strikes.
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(5 Comments)We use it to send all our documents and invoices to our customers and they seem to like it alot.....no paper, just all pdf's....great service...our whole office is very excited about it....customers only see our items...no ads or spam in their inboxes and we track all the items we send and can see when they read them.
the whole concept of paperless mail should be the chance to stop junk mail......if a paperless system is based on making money from advertisers then we all know what the end result will be.....junk spam junk spam...banners everywhere....no no no.
paperless please...no junk and no ads...