UK Postbox Review: Manage Your Post Online

Moving outside of the UK used to mean sacrificing a number of home comforts, as well as the mundane British institutions we sometimes take for granted.

From no longer being able to pick up decent breakfast tea at the supermarket to missing your favourite television programmes, leaving the UK meant occasionally missing out.

Up until recently this deprivation also extended to postal services.

Thanks to a raft of new digital services, our mail doesn’t have to pile up on the door mat waiting for somebody to collect it. If you run a UK business, there are now services — thank God — that deal with the post while you are on the other side of the world.

Enter UK Postbox: The Digital-Remote Mail Box

UK Postbox Review: Need to access your UK mail from abroad?

Whether you are living in Guatemala, Jakarta, the Seychelles or Uzbekistan, from Angora to Zanzibar, you can access your post instantly with UK Postbox.

A digital mail scanning and forwarding service, this clever startup ensures that you can receive and manage your mail online so wherever you are, as long as you can access the internet, you can access your post.

Sounds like a simple premise, right?!

Anybody who has been disconnected from their physical ‘UK address’ will appreciate what a stress this can be.

UK Postbox: How it Works

The UK Postbox homepage.

The company behind UK Postbox is located in the UK and provides a physical UK address for individuals and organisations for all mail to be sent to.

Like virtual offices, you can choose a private PO Box or select a prestigious London street address. All mail received for your account is then scanned by their staff and uploaded to your online postal account. All you need to do is to login and receive your mail.

You can choose whether you want your mail to be physically forwarded to you or whether you want the items securely destroyed and shredded.

The service also allows you to send post from your UK address as well as receive and despatch parcels in bulk.

The benefit of this last service is in avoiding multiple overseas handling charges. Let’s say you want to do some online shopping in your favourite UK stores but each one charges £20 for P&P to your address in Hong Kong whereas UK delivery is free. With UK Postbox you can simply have all of your parcels sent to your personal UK address and then have just one bulk parcel sent via your account.

It’s an incredible cost saver that would have previously involved the bribing of friends and family, followed by praying they spell your address correctly in their reluctant trip to the post office!

Whatever happens with your mail, either physical or virtual handling, you are in full control by delegating the admin side to UK Postbox.

The service is also entirely flexible so if you are prone to moving frequently or haven’t yet decided on a permanent address then you don’t need to worry about constantly updating your redirection service — which can be a major hassle if you use other services, e.g. the traditional UK Post Office redirection subscription.

Prices

There are several ways to pay for the service you receive with UK Postbox from Pay As You Go to monthly subscription fees. Packages for individuals are as follows and are subject to VAT at 20%:

Each subscription is based on a PO Box address with prime London or Dorset addresses being charged extra (from 3 months at £45, Poole up to £120, West End Regent Street, London).

Some remote business users prefer to pay extra for fancy sounding London street addresses, but this is strictly optional. You can pay less for an ordinary sounding address.

The packages include:

The cost to forward mail on is charged at £0.89 plus postage costs with parcels being charged at £1.50 plus postage fees.

Pay As You Go fees are simply charged at a cost of £0.60 per item received and £0.90 per item scanned.

Costs for businesses also vary depending on the volume of mail being received.

In order to verify your identity (and to comply with Money Laundering Regulations) you will need to show copies of your photo ID and proof of your current address.

Tip: Proof of current address is much easier to provide when you set this service up whilst you are still living in the UK. You can trust us on that one!

How UK Postbox Works: A look inside a digital mail box. It beats the door mat!

Review of Extra Features

UK Postbox also offers a paying in service for any cheques received which need to be paid into a UK bank account; once again, this innovative addition to their offerings makes the UK Postbox an invaluable part of emigrating or living abroad.

You can access the service from a PC, laptop, tablet or smartphone and there are apps available on both Android and iOS making managing your online account as easy as checking for email.

The service regularly receives five star independent reviews from individuals and companies using UK Postbox from all over the world.

Disclaimer: We use the service, too. We may be biased.

The company takes digital security very seriously and has invested in links with Evernote and Dropbox to harness the best in cyber protection. Please note that this is not part of the PAYG service but only for subscription members.

Overall the UK Postbox service is an innovative solution for the difficult job of what to do with your UK post and offers a simple, easy and cost effective way to manage your mail in the digital age.

If you are worried about missing important bills, letters or *gulp* notices from the tax man, then it pays to have somebody in charge of handling your post.

This is a job UK that Postbox does better than any company we have found so far.

The registration process is simple and in most cases your account will be ready within 24-48 hours after supplying the necessary proof of identity.

A highly recommended service!

Have you tried the service? Let us know your own UK Postbox reviews below.

We’d also love to hear of any alternatives you can suggest.