1. Email To Snail Mail

You’re a Web-savvy person that relies on email. Yet, for some reason, you still need regular snail mail for all kinds of pesky reasons that just don’t seem to go away. Among them is the fact that everyone seems to need a real address for real mail. Usually when you hear of someone with "no fixed address," you’re listening to a police report about something not so good. But there is a way to get your plain snail mail, electronically. You can avoid paper cuts and attempt to lead a paperless mail lifestyle. You can both send real physical mail without ever touching real paper. You can also receive real mail at a real mail address and see it without ever actually touching a piece of paper.

In this review, we look at two leading services that may help to liberate you from the perils of paper-mail mayhem. On the outbound side, there is the U.S. Postal Service itself, which provides a number of different services. On the inbound side, Earth Class Mail offers a service that provides a physical mail address (or P.O box) and then scans your mail for you viewing (or shredding) pleasure.

USPS Mailing Online

The U.S. Postal Service has at least two different options for sending outbound mail. One is for postcards called CardStore; the other is for letter mail and it’s operated by Click2Mail. Though both can be accessed via USPS.com, they are two different and distinct services.

Sending cards from an online service is a useful service for birthdays and holidays, though the Click2Mail service has much broader applicability. It is clearly geared towards marketers and those who are sending direct mail types of solicitation. But while you can print single quantities, the service can also work for individuals trying to escape their paper cut phobia.

With USPS Click2Mail you can send a postcard, flyer, letter, booklet or even send certified mail.

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Diving into each of those options provides even more letter choices for envelope and paper stock. There are also, of course, the actual mail delivery options as well, ranging the gambit of what you’d expect from the U.S. Postal Service.

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In terms of content composition, you can either load up your own text from a Word document or use the online windows to manually input what you want to write. In limited testing, we found the online content inputting to be more cumbersome and difficult to use than it should be. Inserting images and placing them in the document is something the online editor doesn’t handle particularly well.

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