Zumbox And The Paperless MailBox

This one took me several reads of the web site to understand, but it is fascinating so I thought I'd try to explain it. Here goes.

Digital facsimiles of snail mail, delivered to an electronic mailbox.

But wait you say, isn't that email?

Nope. These are exact digital copies of snail mail, pieces, designs, and everything else. And everyone gets their own digital mailbox, which is separate from an email box. Households have such a box automagically, without signing up.

Zumbox has actually assigned a digital mailbox number to every address in the US -- which I presume means that they have a mathematical formula for converting every postal address into a number when you as a user join online.

You would log on, and then read your facsimile mail without trees falling to make the paper and little stickers and "read this before you throw it away" inserts.

There are a couple of value props here -- environmentalism, lower costs for businesses, shorter mailing lead times, perhaps efficiency for consumers. Also, the company won't need to know the email address of the customer. Since many companies have postal but not email addresses, they will theoretically be able to get higher reach this way.

I try to be supportive of intriguing ideas at all times, even when I cannot entirely see the whole enchilada of how they will get adopted. With Zumbox, there are clearly a bunch of good things to point out. The challenge, of course, will be adoption by consumers -- WHY WOULDN'T A BUSINESS WANT TO LOWER COSTS and leadtimes?

They've got a lot of info on the site about security, and frankly I would welcome a mailbox that doesn't get broken into three times a week by criminals, as my postal service box does. And BTW, the USPS has been absolutely NO HELP WHATSOEVER on that score. So I will assume that this is truly a secure system.

But they really have to spend a great deal of time thinking about the value to the consumer. With virtually no costs to "mailing," won't these boxes be absolutely inundated with prospecting mailers? Virtual postal spam? How is that of value to the consumer? Will we be able to opt out of prospecting mailers? If I could move all the catalogue mailers and crap I get to this, and keep personal letters coming in on paper, I'd do it in a sec. But here's the rub: I'd never check the Zumbox in that scenario.

So I am a question mark on this. Business absolutely should encourage adoption, and join up themselves. Consumers, well, we'll have to see what they have for us in the way of value. They could crack the nut and make this a win win for everyone (except the USPS.) Or it could be a new spam box. Let's all make encouraging noises for Zumbox, and see what they can do.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.