Traditional postal mails, the ones made from dead trees, is one of those few pre-Industrial Revolution technologies which has survived the digital revolution. Despite the growing use of Internet, emails and other communication methods, the postal mail system has shown little sign of decline. Last year 440 billion pieces of mails and letters were generated by the world population, out of which 203 billion were handled by the US Postal Office alone, in a country where 72% of the population uses the Internet.
So what does these figures tell us? That there is a huge market to exploit by merging the Internet with the postal mail system. Wait… it’s already been done and we already discussed 6 services that lets you send/receive postal mails through the Internet . And here is another one – PostalMethods.
Apart from sending and managing traditional paper letters from the comfort of your desktop, PostalMethods provides one more service – the ability to send postal mails from any email account, email client, Google Docs, Zoho Invoice and a host of other services.
To send mails directly from Google Docs or email, first register an account on PostalMethods. Then download their specially formatted MS Word or Google Docs template, fill in the address of the recipient and type your letter. Now simply attach this document and mail it to PostalMethods. The service then extracts the address from the document, prints it and sends it on it's way, while the bill is sent to your PostalMethods account.
Users are allowed to choose paper size, paper quality, paper color, envelope size and a return address if the letter could not be delivered. Prices start from $0.75 per letter for US addresses. Prices are other countries vary.
Update: PostalMethods filled us with some additional information:
Another important thing to mention is that PostalMethods offers advanced Web Services API methods allowing developers to integrate with the service and send mail directly from their business applications. Get your billing system to send those invoices automatically, your ERP to send reports when they are generated and your CRM to send follow up postcards to promising leads. Development account is free, code samples are available and we offer high-level, unlimited quick and free support if needed.
Thank you Kaushik for this post. I'm impressed that you took the time and researched the Universal Postal Union statistics report to dig up those numbers. If I may, I would like to mention that the PostalMethods evaluation account is free. You can fully test the service and see what your mail would look like only your mail is only simulated and not actually delivered.
ReplyDeleteAnother important thing to mention is that PostalMethods offers advanced Web Services API methods allowing developers to integrate with the service and send mail directly from their business applications. Get your billing system to send those invoices automatically, your ERP to send reports when they are generated and your CRM to send follow up postcards to promising leads. Development account is free, code samples are available and we offer high-level, unlimited quick and free support if needed.
Thanks again,
PostalMethods