Digital Post Australia

» see digitalpost.com.au as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Digital Post Australia was set up in 2012 as a joint venture between Fuji Xerox Document Management Solutions and Computershare, and the product was a secure inbox for the mail that used to arrive in an envelope. Your electricity bill and your share statement, delivered into an account instead of into a slot in your front fence. Private testing started in August 2012 with 500 users and a handful of businesses nobody named, and it opened wider in March 2013.

It got there before the post office did, which is the fact the entire story hangs from. Australia Post was building its own Digital MailBox at the same time and launched after. Fuji Xerox later sold its half to Computershare, leaving a share registry company running a national mail service, and by 2013 the sender list had reached 983 organizations.

That number is where the business falls apart when you look at it closely. Of the 983, some 977 were already Computershare share registry clients, which means they were reachable because of a relationship that existed before Digital Post was invented. Six were Queensland local councils. The company had not really sold the product to anyone. It had ported an existing customer list and counted it as traction.

None of this had any route to me and it is worth saying why rather than pretending otherwise. The postal system is the most national institution there is, and a company competing with a country's post office is doing something that stops being interesting the moment you cross the border. Turkey got the same idea from the opposite direction, as a state portal rather than a startup, and the password for it was handed out over a counter at the post office. Same problem, entirely different answer, and neither country was watching the other.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the trademark fight ~

Australia Post sued. It went after the name, arguing that Digital Post Australia was close enough to mislead people into thinking the incumbent was behind it, and it ran several rounds of this. It lost, and then it lost the appeal, with the Full Court of the Federal Court handing down Australian Postal Corporation v Digital Post Australia in 2013.

Reading it now, the litigation looks less like a legal position and more like a small company being told the size of the room it had walked into. Australia Post did not need to win. It needed the other side to spend two years and a legal budget defending its own name during the exact window when it should have been signing up senders.

~ who actually signed up ~

The consumer side reached 12,000 registered users, which for a national service in a country of 23 million is not a rounding error so much as a rounding error's rounding error. The sender side reached nearly a thousand organizations, and we already know what that number was made of.

Chairman David Hynes gave the clearest post-mortem after the fact: the big corporate senders wanted their own platforms. A bank that already has an app and a login has no reason to route your statement through a shared third party, because the statement is a reason for you to open the app. Digital Post was selling convenience to the one party in the transaction that benefits from mild inconvenience.

~ the last day of mail ~

On 18 June 2014 the company told its customers it was closing and that mail delivery would stop the following day. General manager Simon Hughes put it plainly: without enough senders supporting this channel, the service was not sustainable. Users had until 31 July to export their documents, after which the company promised to permanently and securely destroy all personal information it held.

Two months earlier, in April 2014, Zumbox had announced it was shutting down worldwide. Zumbox was the American company whose digital-mailbox technology sat behind the Australian consortium, so the ground had already gone out from under the Australian end. Fifteen months of public operation, and it finished with one won lawsuit and a promise to delete everything.

~ what the mailbox idea kept trying ~

The digital mailbox appears every few years and dies every few years, and the reason is always the same. It assumes the problem is that mail is physical, when the problem is that mail is scattered across every company you deal with. Solving it requires all of those companies to agree to deliver into a place they do not own, which is precisely the thing none of them will do.

Australia Post fought a court case to protect a name for a product that never took the habit either. The version that worked ended up being the one nobody designed: your email inbox, holding a decade of PDF attachments from senders who never coordinated with each other about anything.

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