In these hard times their service is discretionary to say the least.

I never bought into the concept. The reality show was OK.
No surprise, everyone in marketing got canned! Natalee is a smart woman.

It really depends on what you use the service for whether you will like it or not. I travel a great deal and have employees spread all over the country. This is the perfect service since we can all share the same address and still receive our mail. No more paying someone to scan our mail. Sure mail takes some longer to show up because it must be scanned and some longer because you confirm whether you want the contents scanned. What you are not pointing out is that you have the choice to auto-scan all items that show up for you. This reduces the waiting time greatly.

ECM isn’t for everyone but I have a hard time believing that they’ll fold and go under. They may not replace all post office boxes but they certainly won’t go out of business. They’ve completed the final step in creating our paperless office.

ECM is clearly targeting customers who can get away with reading their mail online and rarely or never need to physically receive it. In my case, I need to physically receive a handful of letters per month (legal documents, for instance), so unless I’m willing to wait until the end of the month to get these (which is difficult, since some of them are timely), I have to pay as much as $50/month extra to physically receive them. Other services forward mail through the USPS for as little as $2-3/item. ECM needs to do likewise.

I didn’t find out about this limitation until I received my first critical piece of mail. I was forced to pay $10 to ship that piece of mail, but thereafter, I immediately asked ECM to cancel my account … which they promptly did, but they neglected to tell me until the account was actually canceled that they would not be refunding any of the months I had already paid in advance. Nice.

The sales engineer “Nate” reminds me of Andy Bernard from The Office.

It seems like they have *way* too many staff/VPs for what they are trying to do.

Private Box hasnt charged me for any extra letters that I receive. I can receive 10 or 100 letters and i only get charged for forwarding my letters by weight.

Also, it confuses people. They don’t see it as a PO box so it always confuses anyone you talk to (like the bank) which is a big problem.

Worse of all, they’re customer service SUCKS! They really don’t know what they’re doing. I hate it and am in the process of canceling my services (both business and personal) with them.

These guys are dreamers….

The breakeven on their model makes it almost impossible to make money…

I agree with the previous posts…

I just happened to watch an episode of startup junkies and there it was – earth class mail. Although informative and somewhat entertaining I have to wonder, where do these venture capitalists come from, mars? Using the postal service as an example of the profit potential is way out there – a total apples to oranges comparison. By airing your startup on cable you showed just how unprofessional and foolish your operation is. And when I went to your website and saw that a personal account costs $10 per month I realized that Mr. Weener and his yes men and women are desperate.

I for one would not want anyone stuck in a room with no human contact going through my or my company’s mail!