LegalZoom Virtual Mail Review

Monday, December 2nd

2024 Mail Scanning Service Reviews

LegalZoom Virtual Mail

• Pricing starting at $29/month
• Plans geared solely towards business owners
• Choose address from locations in several states
• Free secure shredding
• $39 extra per month for check deposit subscription (or $10 each)
• 30 days of included physical storage for letters, 10 days for packages
• Unlimited cloud storage of digitized mail

Virtual Mail by LegalZoom is the newest option for mail scanning on our list. It's focused on protecting the privacy and managing the mail of businesses, shielding your personal information from clients and spammers alike. Given that LegalZoom provides a host of services for both individuals and business owners, we were a little surprised that their mail services are only for companies, but it is what it is.

Most states have at least one location for your address

You're able to choose from LegalZoom's network of real addresses for your mail. You'll see those options after you choose a plan: you can either search by city or state or scroll through the list and see what's on offer. Many of the states on Virtual Mail's list only had one location in one city (like Nashville, TN); Texas, Colorado, and California were the only ones that had addresses in multiple cities. Those all track to third-party mailing centers that have partnered with LegalZoom to receive your mail, so don't expect any dedicated facilities owned by LZ when you choose them for your mail scanning service.

5 plans to choose from

The plans and pricing for LegalZoom's Virtual Mail service are pretty straightforward:

• MailBox plans
• Starter: at $29/month, you get 1 business address of choice, 2 recipients (your business and yourself), and it covers 5 mail items.
• Essentials: $39/month gets you 1 business address of choice, 5 recipients (your business, yourself, your partners), and 25 mail items.
• Premium: at $79/month, you can receive mail for up to 20 recipients and 50 pieces.
• MailRoom plans
• Startup: at $139/month, you get 1 business address of choice, unlimited recipients, 100 mail items per month, and a complimentary onboarding session.
• Business: at $229/month, you get the same features of Startup, but your mail items limit increases to 250.

Scans, shreds, and storage included

Scanning is included on all of the pieces received, with no extra charges as long as the document is 20 pages or less. Secure shredding is also part of all Virtual Mail packages. You get unlimited storage of digitized mail; physical mail is stored for free for 30 days, and packages are held for 10 days.

Lots of nit-picky fees

But, there's a lot of a la carte and overage pricing you should be aware of before you commit to using LegalZoom Virtual Mail for your business. If you go over your limit of included mail items, you'll be billed $3 per piece. If your content scans exceed 20 pages, you'll pay $0.10 per page in black-and-white and $0.15 per page in color. Check deposits? You can either pay a $10 fee as you go, or you can subscribe for $39/month and get 5 included checks (and then additional are $2 each). And, if you decide to close your LegalZoom Virtual Mail account but you still want to be able to access it for 6 months (to take care of tying up loose ends, receive any mail that doesn't get caught in time for your change of address paperwork, and so on), you'll pay a $50 "cancellation fee”; that's not charged if you let your account fully close at the end of the current billing cycle.

Too early to say much about the service

It's also difficult for us to say how effective and customer-friendly this mail scanning service actually is. Aside from a few testimonials about LegalZoom Virtual Mail on the website itself, there's just not a lot of buzz about this particular product. There are a few dozen ratings on the two app stores (mostly positive, some negative) and LegalZoom itself has a solid reputation, but Virtual Mail feels too new to have garnered much useful feedback just yet.

Limited and spendy

This service also has quite a few limitations compared with rival mail scanning platforms. There are no options here designed for personal use (RVers, world travelers), and the packages don't include many of the services that rivals give you with their packages. That makes LegalZoom Virtual Mail a more expensive choice for businesses.

Good but has room to grow

Until we hear more from satisfied business owners who have used LegalZoom Virtual Mail for several months (or preferably years), we can only offer a "just average” rating for this mail scanning service. If you're not a business owner, you'll definitely need to look elsewhere. If you do own a company and you're trying to take your mailroom to the all-digital level, we'd recommend checking out the competition before signing up with LegalZoom.