Get mail delivered to your street address virtually with Zumbox
By Emily Price
What if you could get the mail people wanted to send to your house, through your computer? Zumbox is a new Web site designed to give you a virtual inbox (like email) except instead of an email address it uses your actual street address so businesses can send documents to your street address on Zumbox and you can retrieve them online rather than at your doorstep. Confused? So were we.
The idea behind the service is that most businesses have customers actual addresses on file rather than their e-mail addresses (probably because people don’t want the businesses to have their email, but that’s beside the point). Zumbox allows businesses to take that physical address, for instance 123 Apple Ln and instead send the customer a digital message through Zumbox that the customer can then read on their computer.
The business is charged $.02 for each message they send, which should cut down on the level of spam users receive, but be a substantial savings to businesses who are currently going the old stamp and paper route and paying for printing as well as delivery of their messages. The service is currently free for consumers to use.
The idea overall isn’t a bad one. There’s no sense sending a huge paper letter to someone (and paying for the postage and paper) when you could just as easily send it via the Internet (or actually MORE easily). Theoretically though it would make sense for businesses who want to use Zumbox to instead just request email addresses from their customers and send messages to them directly to their email. That way the business would cut out the $.02 fee, and users wouldn’t have to worry with using yet another application on their computer.
While the service claims to be secure it could also be a little sketchy to receive things like medical information, bank statements, and the like from the service, if you don’t know who else might have access to the same information.
Zumbox is currently in beta. You can sign in and check your inbox with your current address here.
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December 29th, 2008
I don’t know if this kind of thing is ever going to work. sounds like a thousand other email advertising schemes I’ve seen since the beginning of dot-com, only this one calls itself green. It doesn’t sound like it’s really going to make all that junk in my mailbox going away so much as increasing the amount of spam I get… no thanks, not interested.