Have you ever wanted to let someone send you an email, but didn’t want to give out your email address?  Thanks to Zumbox, now you can keep your email address safe and sound by simply giving out your physical address instead.  Awesome!  Maybe when I don’t want to give out my phone number, I’ll give out my social security number instead.  Brilliant guys. 

I know where they are trying to go with this idea – they’re trying to replace the ridiculous volume of bills, credit card offers, and junk mail that we all receive, and that is certainly a noble cause, but it just won’t fly unless the senders of this mail buy in first.  If Zumbox could promise me that all my junk mail would come in electronic form (and ideally get filtered out by Google so I’d never see it), then I’d sign up in a heartbeat.  

What’s more likely to happen is that direct marketers will continue to send mail to my physical address and they’ll also send their spam to my Zumbox email address because ITS THE SAME ADDRESS.  The spammers no longer have to trick me into giving up my email address because they can just send their junk email to my Zumbox, and now they can send me even more spam because it’s cheap - Zumbox charges marketers 5 cents per email and the rates are even lower for high volume marketers, so that’s a bargain compared to physical mail.  With rates like these, it’s worth multi-channel spamming someone on their Zumbox and their physical address to get a better response rate.  Wonderful.

So guys, go back to the drawing board, get the USPS and the Direct Marketing Association on board so this idea won’t increase the amount of spam in my life, and then get back to me.

Verdict: Sad. Noble concept, but this incarnation is doomed.