4 ms·

This sounds exactly like what Outbox was described as doing in the article until USPS shut them down. Is there some difference I'm missing? Otherwise Earth Clas

This sounds exactly like what Outbox was described as doing in the article until USPS shut them down. Is there some difference I'm missing? Otherwise Earth Class Mail seems equally vulnerable to being shut down if they become too popular.

tlrobinson 12y ago
ECM gives you a separate mailing address while Outbox picked up/rerouted your mail from your existing address.
- jeffbr13 12y ago
  I wonder why Outbox didn't go this route? If USPS declined to honour re-routing rules to Outbox, then why not just give customers an 'address' at an Outbox depot? USPS would have no choice but to deliver to Outbox (with no other address available), and it would also cut down on spam which isn't directly addressed to the customer. Seems like a much more sensible solution than 'undelivering' mail.
  - saurik 12y ago
    The article states that they initially tried to do this with mail forwarding contracts, but those really aren't designed for this kind of use case (more on this in another one of my comments[1]). To accept mail on behalf of someone else requires a much more complex signup process: you have to get a special form from the postoffice signed in the presence of a notary public and then send that in physical copies to various parties; to get mail forwarded is much simpler. Earth Class Mail tries to help you with this, but as a happy user I honestly had kept putting off signing up due to it: I imagine these services could easily have many more customers if they didn't need such a "hard" form. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7668877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7668877 I imagine, then, that it primarily comes down to this attempt to minimize the perceived pain of the signup process: specifically, the idea that you have to move all of your mail senders to a new address is really off-putting to potential customers; it is effectively like moving from your current home "to" the other provider. I was myself a little against doing this at first, and in fact only came around when I finally physically moved to a new apartment and realized "omg, this is so annoying, and I am not even certain I like my new place, so maybe I'll move again in a few years... I'm going to do this once to ECM instead and maybe then I won't have to do this for another decade". At that point you first look at mail forwarding, and then fall back to "undeliver" while you attempt to argue people into submission that mail forwarding should let you do what you want, or try to get the government to pay you to replace their existing service with yours ;P. But to try to say "our service is so easy: all you do is contact anyone who ever sends you mail, and have them all send mail to us instead! then, if you ever get tired of paying us to receive your mail, you get to do this all over again!" is a really difficult sell, especially for a "hip" "web 2.0" company. I almost want to say they had no other option but the path they took (and no other option than the resulting failure).
saurik 12y ago
To be even more explicit than tlrobinson's answer, they were trying to do long-term forwarding contracts before "falling back" to the painful "undeliver" model. The issue is that the USPS forwarding services are only meant to be used temporarily: they involve a cost to the USPS, and the longest contract you normally can obtain caps out at one year; by default I think you only get six months, in fact. They are really designed for two use cases: "I've moved permanently, but need some time to change all of my upstream addresses" and "I'm temporarily stationed at a different location, but will be back at my house within a month or two". ECM doesn't rely on the USPS in this fashion: your mail is delivered directly to them. I thereby would not be at all worried about the USPS getting angry at them: this article had simply not really highlighted the true point of contention involved. What's really silly, frankly, about Outbox is that they clearly didn't do any due diligence before trying to start that company: somewhere around 2007/2008 is when I was first interested in getting a service like this for my mail. At the time, I thought "hey, maybe I could just forward my mail to this service". I saw you could forward mail, but it seemed like it was for temporary use. My response was not "well, let's see how long I can get away with this": I called the USPS, and within the hour of talking to various people, I was forwarded to the office of the Postmaster General. Now, I didn't talk to "the man himself", but I talked to one of his assistants. I seriously think I started this call path using 1-800-ASK-USPS, the phone number my friends and I would tell jokes to each other about how awesome it would be if the USPS were willing to answer entirely random questions ;P. I explained my use case, and they explained to me that they were not able to offer this service for me, told me the reasons they did offer forwarding, explained why my use case did not fall into this, and was willing to brainstorm with me other options. I actually remember them suggesting hiring a personal assistant to undeliver my mail ;P. In the end, I finally decided (though I didn't get around to it for a long time later) to just "commit" and move all of my mail to ECM and forsake my address: frankly, this was the better option for me. I can see how this creates "market friction", though, for a service that is trying to "convert everyone" like Outbox. I thereby understand why a "hip" "web 2.0" company is instead going to look for something really really easy, like doing the mail forwarding path. What I don't understand is the "disruptive" attitude, however, towards getting what you want. In this case, rather than call the USPS like I did as a mere user in 2008, they seemed to have just started signing up customers with mail forwarding for their new business idea. Well, that kind of sucks: the USPS doesn't want to offer that service. Now, some might think "those meanies don't want to do this" and paint a picture of corruption and bribery, implicating services like bulk mail as the cause of the problem, but if we try to think from the USPS's perspective for a moment: they are designed around this goal of moving mail to the address on the envelope... 99.99999% of their customers need that service, not a service that uses addresses as routing codes to redirect mail to some company. Their mail forwarding infrastructure is thereby expensive to use and maintain: why should Outbox get to use that service for free to make their business easier to operate? So, yeah: I don't think anyone is concerned about the service ECM is offering. They seem to be offering a service that has been supported in some fashion for many decades now (again, it is reasonably equivalent to services that collected mail for people who lived in RVs, traveling the country without any kind of fixed or firm address), they aren't adding cost to the USPS in the way Outbox was, and they don't seem to have ever "made an enemy of the USPS" as Outbox seemed to consider core to their mission statement. I mean, even in their dying throws, they seem to feel like a Derek Khanna hatchet job against the Postmaster General is an appropriate next step... I will claim that this is a kind of "disruptive" attitude that makes it very difficult to actually "disrupt" anything ;P maybe there was some way to work with the USPS, maybe involving paying the USPS (as opposed to licensing stuff to the USPS, as if it had inherent value) would have worked for them? It sounds like they didn't even really try to go in that direction :/.
smoyer 12y ago
As a business, it's pretty easy to have your mail (and packages) delivered to a "private post office" but that becomes your official mailing address and you notify the senders that you've had an address change.

tlrobinson 12y ago

ECM gives you a separate mailing address while Outbox picked up/rerouted your mail from your existing address.

jeffbr13 12y ago
I wonder why Outbox didn't go this route? If USPS declined to honour re-routing rules to Outbox, then why not just give customers an 'address' at an Outbox depot? USPS would have no choice but to deliver to Outbox (with no other address available), and it would also cut down on spam which isn't directly addressed to the customer. Seems like a much more sensible solution than 'undelivering' mail.
- saurik 12y ago
  The article states that they initially tried to do this with mail forwarding contracts, but those really aren't designed for this kind of use case (more on this in another one of my comments[1]). To accept mail on behalf of someone else requires a much more complex signup process: you have to get a special form from the postoffice signed in the presence of a notary public and then send that in physical copies to various parties; to get mail forwarded is much simpler. Earth Class Mail tries to help you with this, but as a happy user I honestly had kept putting off signing up due to it: I imagine these services could easily have many more customers if they didn't need such a "hard" form. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7668877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7668877 I imagine, then, that it primarily comes down to this attempt to minimize the perceived pain of the signup process: specifically, the idea that you have to move all of your mail senders to a new address is really off-putting to potential customers; it is effectively like moving from your current home "to" the other provider. I was myself a little against doing this at first, and in fact only came around when I finally physically moved to a new apartment and realized "omg, this is so annoying, and I am not even certain I like my new place, so maybe I'll move again in a few years... I'm going to do this once to ECM instead and maybe then I won't have to do this for another decade". At that point you first look at mail forwarding, and then fall back to "undeliver" while you attempt to argue people into submission that mail forwarding should let you do what you want, or try to get the government to pay you to replace their existing service with yours ;P. But to try to say "our service is so easy: all you do is contact anyone who ever sends you mail, and have them all send mail to us instead! then, if you ever get tired of paying us to receive your mail, you get to do this all over again!" is a really difficult sell, especially for a "hip" "web 2.0" company. I almost want to say they had no other option but the path they took (and no other option than the resulting failure).

saurik 12y ago

To be even more explicit than tlrobinson's answer, they were trying to do long-term forwarding contracts before "falling back" to the painful "undeliver" model. The issue is that the USPS forwarding services are only meant to be used temporarily: they involve a cost to the USPS, and the longest contract you normally can obtain caps out at one year; by default I think you only get six months, in fact. They are really designed for two use cases: "I've moved permanently, but need some time to change all of my upstream addresses" and "I'm temporarily stationed at a different location, but will be back at my house within a month or two". ECM doesn't rely on the USPS in this fashion: your mail is delivered directly to them. I thereby would not be at all worried about the USPS getting angry at them: this article had simply not really highlighted the true point of contention involved. What's really silly, frankly, about Outbox is that they clearly didn't do any due diligence before trying to start that company: somewhere around 2007/2008 is when I was first interested in getting a service like this for my mail. At the time, I thought "hey, maybe I could just forward my mail to this service". I saw you could forward mail, but it seemed like it was for temporary use. My response was not "well, let's see how long I can get away with this": I called the USPS, and within the hour of talking to various people, I was forwarded to the office of the Postmaster General. Now, I didn't talk to "the man himself", but I talked to one of his assistants. I seriously think I started this call path using 1-800-ASK-USPS, the phone number my friends and I would tell jokes to each other about how awesome it would be if the USPS were willing to answer entirely random questions ;P. I explained my use case, and they explained to me that they were not able to offer this service for me, told me the reasons they did offer forwarding, explained why my use case did not fall into this, and was willing to brainstorm with me other options. I actually remember them suggesting hiring a personal assistant to undeliver my mail ;P. In the end, I finally decided (though I didn't get around to it for a long time later) to just "commit" and move all of my mail to ECM and forsake my address: frankly, this was the better option for me. I can see how this creates "market friction", though, for a service that is trying to "convert everyone" like Outbox. I thereby understand why a "hip" "web 2.0" company is instead going to look for something really really easy, like doing the mail forwarding path. What I don't understand is the "disruptive" attitude, however, towards getting what you want. In this case, rather than call the USPS like I did as a mere user in 2008, they seemed to have just started signing up customers with mail forwarding for their new business idea. Well, that kind of sucks: the USPS doesn't want to offer that service. Now, some might think "those meanies don't want to do this" and paint a picture of corruption and bribery, implicating services like bulk mail as the cause of the problem, but if we try to think from the USPS's perspective for a moment: they are designed around this goal of moving mail to the address on the envelope... 99.99999% of their customers need that service, not a service that uses addresses as routing codes to redirect mail to some company. Their mail forwarding infrastructure is thereby expensive to use and maintain: why should Outbox get to use that service for free to make their business easier to operate? So, yeah: I don't think anyone is concerned about the service ECM is offering. They seem to be offering a service that has been supported in some fashion for many decades now (again, it is reasonably equivalent to services that collected mail for people who lived in RVs, traveling the country without any kind of fixed or firm address), they aren't adding cost to the USPS in the way Outbox was, and they don't seem to have ever "made an enemy of the USPS" as Outbox seemed to consider core to their mission statement. I mean, even in their dying throws, they seem to feel like a Derek Khanna hatchet job against the Postmaster General is an appropriate next step... I will claim that this is a kind of "disruptive" attitude that makes it very difficult to actually "disrupt" anything ;P maybe there was some way to work with the USPS, maybe involving paying the USPS (as opposed to licensing stuff to the USPS, as if it had inherent value) would have worked for them? It sounds like they didn't even really try to go in that direction :/.

smoyer 12y ago

As a business, it's pretty easy to have your mail (and packages) delivered to a "private post office" but that becomes your official mailing address and you notify the senders that you've had an address change.