You’ve heard of an inbox, but how about outbox? Outbox is a new service designed to make reading your snail mail easier. How? By digitizing it, of course! Outbox will digitize those bills, notes, and other bits of physical mail that you get.

Once digitized, the mail will be sent to you electronically, so that you can read your mail on your smartphone, computer, tablet, or other device.

Here’s How Outbox Works

Outbox is first and foremost a service. Those who work for Outbox will stop by your physical mailbox once per week, collect your mail, digitize it, and then send it to you in digital form. When using Outbox, you can decide whether or not you want to unsubscribe from a mailing list, which pieces of mail you want to receive in physical form, and what you want Outbox to do with your mail. Packages are delivered to your doorstep, and Outbox can differentiate between your mail and, say, a roommate’s mail.

What about privacy and keys? Outbox has all the kinks worked out, it seems. Outbox reps claim that every member of the Outbox team is screened to ensure absolute privacy. Even though someone will be going through your mail, the company claims that your details are completely safe and secure. If your mailbox requires a key, you can simply send a photograph of your mail key to the service, and a duplicate key will be made with your permission.

It’s easy to see how Outbox can make some lives easier, especially if you travel regularly and can’t always get your mail on time. But, there is a trust factor that I’m not too sure a lot of people will easily overcome.

Cost and Other Details

Outbox isn’t a free service (after all, that mail collect has to be paid!). The price to have your mail collected, digitized, and sent back to you is $4.99 per month. Adding it up, that comes out to roughly $60 per year. If you’re wondering about the future of Outbox, you might be shocked to know that the U.S.

Postal Service still delivers a ton of mail, even though Saturday deliveries have ceased. Most of the mail received in junk mail, but that makes Outbox even more appealing. Outbox will get rid of any junk mail subscriptions that you mistakenly receive.

Whether or not the average person will go for a service like Outbox is debatable. As mentioned, there’s still that “someone else is reading my mail” factor. But, if it doesn’t’ bother you to have someone else read your mail or know what your bills look like, Outbox might be an interesting solution to your physical mail problem.

It also seems plausible that reading a piece of mail on a tablet or computer may allow you to read that item more thoroughly or pay more attention to smaller details. After all, we are largely trained to read on-screen information these days. If you’re curious about Outbox, check out the company’s video on the main website. Right now, the Outbox service is somewhat limited, but that’s bound to change in the near future.