A Start-Up Plans to Digitize Your Postal Mail

One glaring omission in the list of services that have been transformed by the Internet: postal mail. A start-up, Outbox, is trying to change that by digitizing your mail.

For $5 a month, you can skip trips to the mailbox and sorting and recycling your mail, and instead view and organize all your correspondence on an app and do away with junk mail with the swipe of a finger. With the app, going through your mail becomes easier and more convenient. Your letters and envelopes are picked up from your mailbox and scanned so they’re accessible on a pretty app. You can unsubscribe from junk mail, file mail in virtual folders to look up later and form to-do lists for responding to time-sensitive mail. If there is a piece of mail you want physically, whether it’s the J. Crew catalog or a hand-drawn, you can ask Outbox to deliver it. Otherwise, Outbox shreds and recycles it.

There are a few obvious problems with the concept and execution of Outbox, write Laura June in The Verge. First of all, it is bloated from start to finish: building a "revolutionary" product by piggybacking onto the nation's most laughably bureaucratic, least agile institution seems shortsighted and doomed, but it actually makes the mail experience less efficient than it is today. Outbox says it picks up your mail three days a week, so it seems likely that the turnaround time will be significantly less fast than if you simply bite the bullet and open the mail yourself.