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Email to Postal

email2postal.com

23 pointswyclif25 comments

I signed up to try it out.

I actually think the convenience could be a huge win. I already see lots of potential in the UI. Some thoughts I had:

1. Bridging the gap between digital and analog is not a bad strategy if you can bring all the advantages of digital along with it.

2. Already their UI lets you queue up letters to send, schedule letters for particular days, save drafts, etc.

3. It could track more metadata in the digital world, i.e. all sorts of other mechanisms like custom fields/notes to help you track these against customer problem numbers or account numbers at a business. Automatically support using a Google Doc, etc.

4. I suppose an API to tie it into your own applications could be pretty nifty. Especially if they get to the point of allowing businesses to get more bulk mailing options that are much cheaper than $1 a letter.

5. As I mentioned earlier, add support for a community of user-generated content of greeting cards that can be voted/upvoted,

6. Add support for viral/political/consumerist letter templates that can be shared/embedded. Provide a link and let people pile onto a letter-writing campaign. It might look like astroturf, but could allow people to at least scribble an electronic signature.

Lots of potential here. Just need to follow through. I'll see how my first letter looks.

The cost of credits is: $10.00 - 10 credits, $20.00 - 22, $30.00 - 33, $40.00 - 45, and $100.00 - 110.

So the cheapest per-credit cost is at $40. And there is no price difference between the $20, $30, and $100 options as they all give 10% more credits than dollars.

They have greeting cards, too. I think this service could do well if it emphasized that.

Advice/Request: Can you add user-generated greeting cards like threadless does for T-shirts?

If you do, I think your service will win. Thanks! Bye!

(not sure if the founder is reading this, of course)

I'll make sure he sees this. I just sent him the link.

I don't get it. When I need to mail a letter, why can't I just send it myself?

Hint: If there are some good usage scenarios, it would be good to explain them on the home page. Customers evaluate new products by their benefits, not their features.

I am in agreement. This sounds like an idea that was not thought out.

C'mon. Where else can you get your message enveloped in "Jakob Nielsen Green"? That's startup gold, IMO.

laziness, i assume. here's the steps i need to take in order to mail a letter: (a) buy a printer/set it up (b) buy paper/envelopes (c) visit the posto office with my sealed letter, so that they can tell me how much it will take to ship it to some destination abroad (because how the hell would i know)

for something i do, maybe, once a year, that's a hell of a lot of work

and, no, i don't own a printer. it's not useful in the general case. ditto television. my toaster oven rocks the house, though.

The same way I am, I mail so rarely that I usually dont have any stamps, and when I do they are usually the wrong amount (seems to change often). So I need to spend the time to find the correct price, maybe go buy more stamps then mail it. If I could just use a service like this I would probably do it. Although when I do have to mail things I usually have to include things so its a manual process anyway.

Maybe this is tailored to use for complain letters or threats that people don't want coming from their geographically location...?

How about cost/speed of delivery? What if you live in India, and you want to send a b-day card to your cousin out in the States? Instead of $.42 or whatever, you have to pay and wait for international travel.

I can kinda see where they are going with this. Although I would probably never use it (I very rarely send a letter by regular mail), I can think of some use cases where I could use it. My great grandma doesn't use email. I don't think she even has a computer. Every time her or my great grandpa would send me something it would come with at least a page of a letter just telling me about how they were doing. I also never seem to have any stamps. So in lieu of going out getting stamps and writing something on paper, and buying getting envelopes, I could just send an email. I mean if it is rare occasion why not? It's going to cost me like $20 for the stamps, maybe $10 for the envelopes. Thats just to send one letter. Now if I sent letters all the time the investment of stamps and letters would be worth it, but because the next time I am going to send one again will be months, years, whatever, I will probably lose the envelopes, the postage will be raised and I will need more stamps, and my grandma will never get a letter.

Earthclassmail.com does the reverse - it's for people living abroad who still need access to postal mail

"Thousands of customers in over 130 countries are using our service right now. They have their postal mail forwarded to one of our processing facilities, instead of to an office or home address, and then they can view scanned images of each envelope’s exterior (via a secure online account) and direct us to..[open it+scan the contents/discard it/shred it]"

Interesting...and kind of scary. I think I'll keep relying on my parents for a while yet:-)

Thanks for the comments and all the good ideas - we'll revisit the font complaint below and think through some of the other suggestions.

International goes online within the next few days, as does the ability to include a photograph (4x6 glossy print).

Thanks for mentioning the unicode as well; we'll be sure to begin testing that. As for pre-written and shared political letters, that's a great idea we've been considering.

email2postal.com

The indian post office has been doing this for over 10 years.

http://www.indiapost.gov.in/Netscape/epost.html

(About 15 cents per page)

Hey, it's sort of like Gmail Paper but it's not April 1st yet.

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/paper/more.html

The non-parallelism in the name of this service is really a problem as far as brand and influence goes, but I'm interested to see if the service is actually useful.

An API-accessible variant: http://www.postalmethods.com/

interesting service that, i suspect, might actually find an audience. i, for instance, wouldn't mind using it to communicate with some friends abroad. speaking of which--i hope they print unicode okay?

I'm pretty sure they wouldn't send mail abroad for just a dollar. And indeed they serve "US Domestic, APO, FPO" ie within US, plus US military mail.

USPS.com already lets you upload or type in a document to send as hard copy mail.

Can you provide a specific link?

Its almost a parody of itself. Part of me wants to believe its in jest.

    font-family: "lucida grande", "lucida sans", verdana, tahoma, arial, sans-serif;

Bad call on the font choice...

It's sad that the first thing I notice when visiting websites nowadays is the usability/design of it

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