Postful licks your envelopes for you

While a lot of what I do exists in digital form there are times when I must interact with the physical world. During those times I often wonder how digital innovations can be applied. Naturally email in contrast to snail-mail is just one of those things which is why I am glad to see Postful getting some traction. The concept is simple; email your letter to Postful and they will print it, put it in an envelope, stick a stamp on it and post it. It cuts out every single painful step of snail-mail (buying stamps, buying envelopes, finding a post-box) and goes even further to offer benefits to people who still use snail-mail over email. The main benefit is archiving. With Postful you send out an email which time-stamps it and has the to-address recorded. Simpler than printing off two copies or filing the Word document in your “sent to customer” folder while having to add time and address details manually.

Postful is also looking into offering an API for this which would be a good step for virtual companies that are required to send physical letters. Doing that manually or hiring an external mail company to do it is expensive.

I hope Postful goes worldwide with distribution points in many countries and not just allowing international email to be sent from the States.

Now we just need better services for the return post. I’d love to give banks, insurance providers and every other antiquated company a physical Postful address. Postful then scans in and emails me whatever is sent to that address. If I want to reply to the letter I hit Reply in my email client, type “I will not pay that bill!” and hit send. No stamps, no envelopes, no finding a post-box, no paper-cuts.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 6:47 am and is filed under Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Jonathan Brazil 1 year ago 1 point
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Do I read this right Paul, that Postful will have access to view both your out-going mail and your incoming mail? If so I think we just found the stumbling block for companies in terms of privacy and data protection?

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Paul Watson 1 year ago 1 point
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Well if I were a company using Postful I'd insist on an SLA and T&Cs and Privacy agreements etc. etc.

The same as any mail company has today. Many large companies use 3rd parties for their mailing needs.

Postful doesn't currently do incoming email, just your outgoing.

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Jonathan Brazil 1 year ago 1 point
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Fore sure on the SLA, but surely 3rd parties are only used for bulk mailing? Perhaps I am wrong but I would have thought that the data protection and privacy would be a concern moreso from the recipient's (customer or whatever) side? I always check that little box to say no 3rd party sharing of details, I thought that would cover bulk mailers too?

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Paul Watson 1 year ago 1 point
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I don't know what the law says about 3rd party vs. contracting out internal services. I'd assume there is a difference as many firms outsource their accounting work which is definitely sensitive data.

Also I'm not sure how the law sees API systems. With Postful I'd use their API to automate various letters I have to send to my customers.

The "share with 3rd party" check-box in my view is separate to this. That would be PayPal selling/sharing my email to a 3rd party that doesn't provide a core service to PayPal. But if PayPal were to use Postful I wouldn't see that as being part of the "don't share with 3rd party" agreement.

Naturally Postful has to be reliable and responsible and I'd hope their printing and enveloping system is automated and not some Indian slave worker stuffing envelopes and reading my love letters to Paris.

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