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I've never heard of this kind of service. It sounds like something I want ASAP. Any downsides?

by warent 5y ago

toomuchtodo 5y ago
With any mail processor, you're sort of married to them once you start giving out the address. I spent months agonizing over who I was going to tie myself to (and did quite a bit of research from HN folks [1] [2] providing their recommendations). In the end, I picked the vendor I did because I only get a few pieces of mail a month, they're responsive, and I can use them for residency purposes [3] (as my long term plan is to bounce from the US and be an expat). And unlike a startup, they have some longevity track record and are likely to continue to exist into the future, which is important when everyone is going to have them as your mailing address. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5822052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5822052 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19076624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19076624 [3] https://theboatgalley.com/establishing-residency-at-st-brendans-isle/ https://theboatgalley.com/establishing-residency-at-st-brend...
banana_giraffe 5y ago
I had such a service for a while. The only two issues I ran into was: - Getting the physical mail out of them was hard. In theory they kept main for some number of days if I needed it physical for some random reason, but the two times I needed to have them forward me some important document, it had already been shredded. All in all, this was a minor edge case really. - One company, All State, could not for the life of them realize that I did not live in some PO Box in a different state. They kept changing my rates to the state of the service, and I had a confusing call with a CSR each time where I tried to explain my mailing address and my residential addresses were unrelated. All State was the only company I ever encountered with this issue, everyone else that needed my home address had no trouble with this concept. I solved this by ditching All State. I only stopped using them because they got bought out and only kept business accounts. I should look for a replacement company, it was very useful.
refurb 5y ago
From what I’ve heard the addresses for these services are being tagged as “not a residence” in some database. Then some services aren’t accepting them as a valid address. Similar to how phone numbers can be tagged VoIP and won’t be accepted for 2-factor authentication.

I've never heard of this kind of service. It sounds like something I want ASAP. Any downsides?

by warent 5y ago

I've never heard of this kind of service. It sounds like something I want ASAP. Any downsides?

With any mail processor, you're sort of married to them once you start giving out the address. I spent months agonizing over who I was going to tie myself to (and did quite a bit of research from HN folks [1] [2] providing their recommendations). In the end, I picked the vendor I did because I only get a few pieces of mail a month, they're responsive, and I can use them for residency purposes [3] (as my long term plan is to bounce from the US and be an expat). And unlike a startup, they have some longevity track record and are likely to continue to exist into the future, which is important when everyone is going to have them as your mailing address. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5822052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5822052 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19076624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19076624 [3] https://theboatgalley.com/establishing-residency-at-st-brendans-isle/ https://theboatgalley.com/establishing-residency-at-st-brend...

banana_giraffe 5y ago

I had such a service for a while. The only two issues I ran into was: - Getting the physical mail out of them was hard. In theory they kept main for some number of days if I needed it physical for some random reason, but the two times I needed to have them forward me some important document, it had already been shredded. All in all, this was a minor edge case really. - One company, All State, could not for the life of them realize that I did not live in some PO Box in a different state. They kept changing my rates to the state of the service, and I had a confusing call with a CSR each time where I tried to explain my mailing address and my residential addresses were unrelated. All State was the only company I ever encountered with this issue, everyone else that needed my home address had no trouble with this concept. I solved this by ditching All State. I only stopped using them because they got bought out and only kept business accounts. I should look for a replacement company, it was very useful.

refurb 5y ago

From what I’ve heard the addresses for these services are being tagged as “not a residence” in some database. Then some services aren’t accepting them as a valid address. Similar to how phone numbers can be tagged VoIP and won’t be accepted for 2-factor authentication.