We will first go through some advantages of this service. First and foremost, it’s incredibly cheap at $4.99/month and free to try for the first month. Also, you don’t have to ever lose a piece of mail with this service because the digital files stay with you forever! This means you do not have to dig through endless stacks of paper mail to find a document you want. Another advantage is that you can access your mail anywhere which can be extremely helpful on the go.There is also this cool feature where you can create to-do lists for bills or other items and they will send you reminder notifications. You may be asking about what they do with packages. Well, if you click “request” they will deliver any requested mail to your front door so Outbox also acts like a mail filter. Perhaps my favorite feature is that you can “unsubscribe” to junk mail and they will never be sent to you ever again. Awesome!
Before you go signing up for this I want to mention some of the red flags. I am not quite sure about someone coming to my mailbox three times a week, taking out my mail, opening it, and then scanning them. It just seems like an invasion of privacy to me, not to mention illegal. They claim it’s all legal, though. You may be wondering what they do if you live in an apartment complex where you need a key to access your mailbox. You can take a picture of your key, send it to them, and they can make a key replica from the picture. Whoa this seems like a sketchy operation! This is a scary idea and now I will be more conscious on including my keys in pictures from now on. Outbox may also help increase the hurting of the USPS as they hugely rely on the junk mail that is being sent to you. The people who send you this junk mail may have to be forced to move to a paperless business model which may greatly hurt the USPS.
With this service you may have to weigh out the benefits and disadvantages to see if this is right for you. Are you willing to sacrifice your privacy for better organization of the mail that is being sent to you? For now, I think I will stick with the “ancient” way of receiving mail as I do not think I am brave enough for this service. What do you think? Would you be interested in this?
