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Comment by kaolinite | Hacker News Reader

One of the ideas in my ideas file is a service that provides an API for sending letters. You simply send a PDF/DOC/etc along with address information, your API key, postage type, etc, and then the letter is printed (by myself) and posted.

Possible uses of the service would be automatic sending of invoices or mailing out payment reminders or contracts that need to be signed, etc.

There are a few companies that provide similar services but I haven't found one that does it in a particularly nice way. They often require using SOAP and don't have modules for common frameworks and SDKs for common languages.

Would any of you use this or are letters completely dead to young companies?

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International is where this could really shine, print out at the location closest to where the letter needs delivering & avoid international prices

avoid international prices

For many pairs of countries the price of sending a letter from A->B is less than sending a letter within B. In addition I imagine the labor costs of having people stuff envelopes will a significant source of costs. So you're probably better off picking 3-5 central points with cheap labor and cheap postage, rather than opening dozens of small centers all around the globe

That would be great as if there was no one servicing your area you could potentially sign up as a 'poster' allowing more remote areas to be connected if someone was available.

.....nice idea!

I would like to be able to timeshift delivery which would sit well with your solution, eg. buy cards en masse, write them out all at once, pay one fee delivery charge, then they are delivered as required at different dates -- perfect for birthday cards for example

http://www.postalmethods.com/

I used Postful for years, and moved to PostalMethods when Postful was sold a couple of years ago.

I quite like PostalMethods -- it's even simpler than Postful was (Postful required the to address in the subject line of your email). They help you format your letters so the addressee will show up in the right location for a window envelope... then once you're all set up, you just send PDFs to them via email, and each email is another letter printed and posted.

They have an API as well (I think that's actually their focus), but I've never used it -- I only need snail mail at low volume and manually-created, so email is perfect.

I don't have any need for EasyPost, personally -- because I'm doing principally US mail while I'm living elsewhere in the world.

We've used PostalMethods with both Quickbooks (invoicing clients who don't take email for invoices; Quickbooks emails the invoice to PostalMethods, who prints and mails it for us) and for our clients (using the API to send letters and postcards).

We love them.

I looked for a service like that a year or so ago and found this:

https://click2mail.com/email-to-mail

At the time their signup process was broken so I couldn't test it out, but the idea is very similar to what you described. You send an email to them with a specially formatted subject line, plus a body and/or attachments, and they mail it for you.

A big issue is document security...you will have to convince companies to trust you with confidential documents.

Stamps.com uses SOAP and is terrible. I would love a nice Json/REST based shipping API.

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