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If I'm reading the article correctly, they did this from the very start: "It was around this point that they became vulnerable by their own success. The local
by justinpombrio 13y ago
If I'm reading the article correctly, they did this from the very start:
"It was around this point that they became vulnerable by their own success. The local Austin, TX and San Francisco, CA Post Offices allowed individuals to sign forwarding contracts to have their mail forwarded to Outbox with the intention of it being opened and scanned – without these agreements Outbox’s market model wouldn’t be possible. In practice there are many types of forwarding contracts that the Post Office allows, so these contracts were not necessarily unusual. Further, there were no reports of complaints by customers. These were all customers who wanted their mail to be forwarded, opened and scanned by Outbox."
- saurik 13y agoThis paragraph is referring to mail forwarding, not mail agency; this is just the simple form used to divert your mail to another destination, and which is only supposed to be used temporarily. The form that is required to have someone else receive mail on your behalf is a much more "complex" form in that it requires you to sign it with a notary public and then dispatch to various parties in multiple copies, rather than just stopping at your local post office branch.
- anigbrowl 13y agoConsider that the forward approach was basically trying to dump the cost of rerouting the mail - which was expensive enough that it ate Outbox's runway - onto the USPS.