It might be a “Back to the Future” Web 2.0 application, but handy if you need to pound out a postal letter to your grandma, business associate, or you just want to have your own virtual mail room to feel like a corporate giant. Nonetheless www.postful.com (not to be mistaken with the makers of Raisin Bran) provides a nice service to allows you to translate e-mail to print in the matter of minutes.
Signing up is easy and in the mater of a couple minutes you can associate a unique email address (something@postful.com) to accept email and send to the postal address you assign to this address.
Here are a few of the listed features..
- Send photos by including them as attachments.
- Send PDF and Office documents.
- Send letters just by including a name and mailing address in the subject line.
- Create special e-mail addresses for frequent contacts so that you don’t have to type in their address each time.
- Send to an entire mailing list with a single e-mail.
- Full color, high quality printing.
- Use rich text formatting.
- Keep records of all letters you send.
- Send to military APO and FPO addresses as easily as any other address.
- Send letters internationally (50 countries in place, more to come).
The service also has an integrated API (Application Programming Interface) meaning programmers can integrate it your applications. A useful idea I had was a WordPress-Postful Plugin that you allow subsribers to pay a monthly fee and have your articles and blog posts mailed to those willing to pay a fee.
For example, if I had 14 people that wanted my vital and helpful blog posts mailed to them, I could use PostFul to send send an email notification to user1@postful.com, user2@postful.com, ect.. and they would receive the print edition of Another Mans Blog.
Useful? No, it’s Postful!
Pricing is as follows:
Letters Mailed to the United States:
99¢ for the 1st page, 25¢ each additional page
Letters Mailed Internationally:
$1.49; for the 1st page, 39¢ each additional page
I am not thinking my blog posts would be worth the $.99, but should you feel differently and want these mailed to you, I will gladly work on the WP-Postful Plugin for the world to use.
A word of warning when using this service - use UNIQUE @postful.com addresses and get crazy about it, if a spammer get’s a hold of this address you will be in a world of hurt. An email address like bnf63gh554-3385566@postful.com is good. Never (and I mean never) share this with anyone, the last thing you want is a SPAM to Postal Mail Service that costs you $.99 each time one of those devils sends you a Viagra Advertisement.
Tags: email, postal mail, postful
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