On Dec 26th you explicitly proclaimed your transparency and that you were not working with Zumbox as a client. And yet in this article you posted on your site yesterday http://www.maxg...reen/#more-1342 you expressly admit that they are a consulting client of yours. I knew I smelled a rat. Blogger-journalist or blogger-publicist? I think now we know. And it’s highly unethical.

It’s easier to tell the truth than to lie. If you lie you have to keep track of your lies, Mr. Reed.

12.1 While a subscriber of the Services, you agree to support the Do Not Paper Mail program promoted by us and will assist us in encouraging your mail senders to send billing statements, correspondence and other media to you through http://www.Zumbox.com .

12.2 You agree to permit us to identify you in a listing to vendors and other commercial, governmental and non-profit senders (collectively, “Senders”) as a “Do Not Send Paper Mail” subscriber.

12.3 You agree that we are permitted to send to Senders, as and when applicable, your change of address information.

You want to talk about options or forcing me to agree to this bs?

To send something to a postal address you have to have an online Zumbox account. So for example if my Grandad is going to use a website to send me something to my Zumbox, wouldn’t he already be using email?? And if I am going to pay to send out a mass marketing campaign it will be a waste of money because 90% of the addresses I am sending to don’t have a Zumbox account.

This all defeats the purpose if you ask me. I can’t see this coming in useful unless loads of people find out about Zumbox and we can truly reduce mail such as bills coming through.

A better service would be for them to intercept your mail, scan it, and have it available to you online wherever you are. That will never happen due to confidentiality issues though.

I’m looking forward to introducing my company to this if I think it’s good.

More info here: http://www.digi...munity_773.aspx

1. If I have internet connectivity, I’d say the odds are pretty good that I have an email address.
2. If I have to tell the company to contact me at zumbox, isn’t that the same step as giving them my email address?
3. So now I have two “electronic mail” addresses that I have to check.

Perhaps I’m missing something.

This model should include a fee to send any message/mail. Part of each digital “stamp” would go to the recipient of the message. This kills two birds with one stone:

First, it creates a financial burden/hurdle for the sender of the message which would hopefully make spamming less attractive.

Secondly, if the recipient of the message gets a portion of the “stamp” proceeds, and if the recipient has to “redeem” the balance of these proceeds online (claim an ACH deposit by entering a code they get via their postal address) then the recipient may be motivated to get an internet connection (and the proceeds may be enough to subsidize their internet subscription).

This could become a new approach to ad-subsidized net access (similar to FreeDSL). It also gets more people on the net (which is in every business’s interest).

And if I’m getting PennySaver ad equivalents in my Zumbox, but getting paid for it, I don’t mind a little spam. Direct mail is a huge waste of time, energy and resources. Move it to digital and make it work for everyone.

The fact is that no transactional mailer of any significance would ever use Zumbox to deliver its billings, etc., to its customers. The fact is that direct mail will continue to use up dead trees so long as it makes money. Zumbox, with no value proposition to compel users to sign up for its service, will never get enough audience to compel Hammacher Schlemmer to abandon paper postal mail and just shut down its revenue engine. Other technologies might, but Zumbox is just a bad business plan, a bad approach to what we can all agree is a big problem (wasteful junk mail), that is doomed to fail. At the end of the day I see deceptive marketing practices veiled in green talk that are designed to get people to give up yet more personal information to marketers. As an ACLU card-carrying member that chaps my hide.

I would hope that you understand that people have two problems with junk mail, not just the environmental issue. The second problem is privacy – your name being sold over and over to more marketers. That’s what Zumbox is planning to do. So they are neither going to reduce the environmental impact of paper mail or improve the privacy crisis in this country. To add insult to injury their technology could enable criminals to perpetrate even more fraud and steal your identity as WilliamC described above.

My motivation is simply being fed up with slimy marketing schemes, and to see respected sites like TC and Max Gladwell get suckered in by Zumbox’s hype, well, that got my juices flowing. Bloggers like to call themselves journalists. I thought Robin was more of a journalist than you were because at least she gave a balanced report and highlighted some of the credibility issues with Zumbox’s claims. Your blog post seemed, to me, to be “bought” it was so non-skeptical. Why blog if you’re not going to practice journalism and exercise some skepticism? Why put yourself out there as an expert if you won’t do the spade work of journalism? I used to read the Max Gladwell blog on occasion but I will probably no longer bother to in the future.

But our post also simply reports the facts. It wasn’t an endorsement. Most companies that promote E-billing and paperless statements do so with some type of green angle. All of which is legitimate b/c paper and postage have tremendous environmental impacts. We gave an overview of the total impact of the USPS paper mail system. Zumbox won’t solve this problem in its entirety. But the Prius won’t solve global warming or dependence on foreign oil, either. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t preferable to less-efficient alternatives.

We also didn’t have to go out of our way to point out the security issue b/c we linked here and quoted from the post. That also wasn’t our angle. That’s a journalism term for how one approaches a story. We blog about green issues, so that was our angle in reporting about Zumbox.

Objectively speaking, though, we don’t see how Zumbox’s claims are “hypish”. We don’t see them making any claims, in fact, other than that they have a new technology that offers an alternative to the paper-based USPS. They can’t really claim anything b/c they’ve just entered public beta. Before a couple days ago, they had exactly zero users as far as we can tell. So it’s also hard to see how it’s a scam. Don’t you have to scam someone for it to be a scam?

In fact, your claims are the ones that come across as overblown. Everything you says starts with “If”. Everything you say remains to be seen.

BTW, what’s your motivation? We and TechCrunch are looking for traffic. You wrote more words than either of us. To what end?

First of all the adoption rate of EBPP (electronic bill presentment and billing) is far higher than 15%. For most major mailers in the US it is already over 50% using their own infrastructures. There are examples in other countries with higher internet adoption rates of even higher percentages. Zumbox will be as limited as any other electronic billing method by internet adoption rate, so to fantasize over 100% electronic billing anytime soon like Zumbox’s hype is kind of silly, IMHO. More and more companies are offering only electronic billing (especially for services that involve computer access, the assumption being you own one). Zumbox isn’t going to create that effect… it’s been happening on its own for more than a decade.

It’s the old 80/20 rule, if not 95/5. Look in your own mailbox. The vast majority of transactional mailers are major corporations that have real IT departments and have to meet real regulatory compliance. They’re not going to opt to insert their privacy-sensitive billing records into ultra-low-security zumbox accounts when they have their own secure electronic billing infrastructures already in place that comply with all the regulatory requirements. Zumbox doesn’t even claim that their system is compliant with a single one of these regulatory *requirements* – they’re not even consciously aware of them, it appears. If all you care about is junk mail and you don’t truly intend to get financial billers then why bother to build expensive data centers and pay for expensive compliance programs?

Customers who won’t opt in for electronic billing because they prefer paper are not going to opt for Zumbox over their own bank’s or cable company’s electronic options. It’s simply preposterous to think that Zumbox is going to change consumer behavior.

All that means that the only “mailers” that may augment their paper mailings (but not likely stop their paper mailings because, as you point out, they still pull economically) are direct marketers, who don’t have to comply with significant regulatory compliance like billers do. Zumbox does not have a *single* major bank or utility company or any major 1st class mailer using their system… why should any consumer sign up for an account to receive only spam??? Their IT sophistication is obviously very low (although their lawyers are concerned about protecting the priopietary nature of the “jokes” and “characters” per my post above) to not even understand how difficult it is to get any bank to push privacy-sensitive information into any other company’s computer system, much less an entertainment media-oriented startup with only $3M of funding. Get real, Max. You really think your bank is going to give you the option of using your Zumbox account to get their bank statements? As Seth and Amy would say, “REALLY?!”

This company is treating privacy and regulatory compliance like a joke. Neither the founders or the investors in Zumbox did any sort of due diligence of what real mailers will require – trust me, this just happens to be the field I work in. They are representing ecological benefits when none will transpire if no major mailers shift to using their system – and that’s just not going to happen; doing so borders on fraud if not just simply false advertising. Some people call this “greenwashing.” This company isn’t even ready to prepare to get ready for prime time… they seem utterly clueless about privacy laws, SAS70, Sarbanes-Oxley, GLB, and a raft of other regulatory requirements that would need to be met before any major corporation would ever use their system for transaction mail, legal correspondence, tax, insurance or any of the things that we as consumers would consider “important mail.” If you’re excited about getting your Bed Bath & Beyond coupons in a Zumbox account that’s fine, but you shouldn’t fool yourself – or your blog readers – to think that you’re helping the ecology much. To do so would be journalistically dishonest, IMHO, and I thought you (i.e. Rob Reed) were above that, “Max.” Guess I was wrong. Paid PR seems to be what you’re really all about.

The question then is whether email is adequate. It’s not. That’s why the adoption rates for e-billing are so low (15% at best).

While most of us hate junk mail (direct marketing), it wouldn’t exist if it didn’t work. Clearly someone is responding and even benefiting from junk mail. We’ve been known to use the 20% off coupons from Bed Bath & Beyond. So junk mail isn’t necessarily the problem. For us, it’s the time it takes to sort thru and filter out the important mail coupled with the waste stream 90% of the junk mail creates, despite recycling that paper. We may still want to get the MacMall catalog; we just don’t want the paper version.

And then there’s the $5.1 billion that the U.S. Postal Service lost last year. Wonder who picked up that tab? Oh yeah, the taxpayers. If a private alternative can help the USPS operate more efficiently (through competition), we’re all for it. Zumbox will never replace the USPS, but clearly that gov’t monopoly needs some help.

Before deciding NOT to sign up for this service I read the terms and conditions on their website and about fell out of my chair. As someone who works with lawyers in my day job (I’m not a lawyer) I can only guess that they never had qualified legal counsel review their T&C before, and they never thought any intelligent user would take two seconds to read it. (If a real privacy attorney reads this and can tell us what they think I’d appreciate it.)

Zumbox’s T&Cs appears to have a lot of boilerplate language that doesn’t make sense in this context. Section 2 actually says that their “jokes” and “characters” are proprietary content of Zumbox. I guess these guys all come out of entertainment media so they must have re-used an old T&C boilerplate and forget to scrub out the irrelevan. While agreeable enough and seemingly innocuous it made me nervous so I read the rest of the agreement with far more scrutiny. Didn’t take long to find the land mines.

First of all, nowhere does the agreement say that your personal information will be protected from marketers. To the contrary, you might as well just mail them your entire wallet! All they’re going to do is sell your name to more marketers to send you more junk mail, veiled by your unwitting conscription as a soldier in their “Do Not mail Paper” war-on-mailers campaign. Check this out!:

12. Do Not Paper Mail Program

12.1 While a subscriber of the Services, you agree to support the Do Not Paper Mail program promoted by us and will assist us in encouraging your mail senders to send billing statements, correspondence and other media to you through http://www.Zumbox.com .

12.2 You agree to permit us to identify you in a listing to vendors and other commercial, governmental and non-profit senders (collectively, “Senders”) as a “Do Not Send Paper Mail” subscriber.

12.3 You agree that we are permitted to send to Senders, as and when applicable, your change of address information.

No thanks, Yarone. 12.2 sounds to me like you’re just planning to sell my name to marketers of all kinds. 12.3 sounds to me like once I stick my hand in this trap I’ll never be able to get it back out again, even by moving to another state. Run, people. Run!

When Citibank starts sending bank statements through Zumbox I’ll sign up, but I can’t see it happening, honestly. The IRS isn’t going to send you your tax documents by Zumbox. My kids’ school isn’t gonig to send me their report cards by Zumbox. My aunt Betty isn’t going to send me a greeting card using Zumbox. They and we do not need Zumbox to create paperless mail. Gimme a break, that already exists. Schlock marketers will fill the zumbox accounts with 2-penny ads, that’s about it.

What Zumbox needs more than anything else is an opt-out so that no one else can steal your mail by registering with your name and address (to WilliamC’s point). That still sucks because it’s just one more way thieves can get to your identity. Thanks, Zumbox! Thanks for putting it on all Americans to be vigilant to yet one more way to have their privacy violated andidentity stolen.

If it wasn’t Christmas I’d have half a mind to ring up Scott Hardy today and file a class action suit against Zumbox on behalf of all Americans for putting our personal identities at undue risk of theft/fraud. Who wants in? We better move fast – they only raised $3M – but with Larry Ellison as an investor maybe we can get to some deep pockets! Whaddya say, Scotty?

The *only* possible profitable place for this that I see is in the legal system. if you can convince the court that a zumbox message is a good faith effort, then you can eliminate certified mail and completely automate bringing someone to trial. In fact, if you can convince the court that zumbox has legal standing, you have a huge revenue stream there – totally legit.

But the interviewer hadn’t a freakin clue what I was talking about, so I left.