In one of the more ambitious attempts to end snail mail, Zumbox is opening up their site to the public so that any person or business with a street address in the United States can send and receive traditional mail through digital means.
To get started, you'll need to enter your name and address and then wait a few days for a piece of snail mail from the United States Post Service with a pin number. Once you receive your pin number you can start viewing and sending mail via Zumbox in the same manner that you would via the post office.
Received mail appears in cute little envelopes that users can interact with, while sending mail is just as simple. Zumbox offers a variety of tools to make sending mail of any format type (think HTML, Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXPress, CRM, and PostScript) to a variety of audiences a breeze. Plus, you can store contact information, transfer content and recipient lists via Zumbox's secure FTP, and use the printer driver to send mail right from accounting software.
And don't think that the electronic version of your mail that Zumbox sends is any less real than your regular mail. You can receive your bills, statements, special offices, personal mail, and interactive mail complete with audio and video.
Businesses should listen up and pay attention. Any organization with a US mailing address can send mail free of charge to specific addresses, mailing lists, and geographic regions, all the while saving the economy and your recipients' time. Marketers and advertisers can pay 5 cents per street address to use Zumbox and get campaign management tools for insight the USPS could never provide.
All in all this just makes sense. Everyone benefits from sending and receiving mail online. Marketers can actually track campaigns, consumers can stop worrying about shredding bank statements and tossing junk mail, and we call help drastically reduce the amount of paper we use. It's a win for everyone and we love it.
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