http://www.postful.com/ http://www.l-mail.com/

Both look pretty clean and offer various capabilities to send lots of letters more efficiently, including an API.

In the year 2009 snail mail is grossly inadequate.

1. Does it prove anything? No. Sign something with a private key, that is proof.

2. Is it better for record keeping? No. Fires, floods, and rot are all enemies. Storing it digital allows one to replicate a lifetime of mail in 10 seconds.

3. Aesthetic? Only if you have a strong packrat or nesting instinct.

4. Cheaper? No. Not by a fucking longshot, not even close.

Take a one dollar bill out of your wallet, burn it, and send an email.

My thoughts on this line were as follows.

1) It needs to allow photos. They can be an extra charge of course, but I would want to send photos.

2) There's a ton of paper handling equipment out there. If you invested about $20K, maybe 10K if you bought used, I would think you could get a solution that was 100% automated. It printed, stapled, folded, printed the envelope, and stuffed the contents. A service with such an automated capability, that showed pictures of their equipment on their website so I knew it was real, would definitely be reassuring from a privacy standpoint, as well as a reliability standpoint.

3) As for API, my thought was to make the whole thing, just email. Parse incoming emails to confirm the sender is an account holder. Parse the email for the markup headers that you define to designate recipient address. If they don't exist, fire off a reply email to the same address, telling them they messed up and didn't mark up their submission properly. Done. No visiting your website at all, after I set up my account.

3a) I would also suggest a way for me to assign frequently used snail mail addresses as part of an email address. For example, say you assign me the email address QWERTY@mailservice.com. Whenever I mail to that address, you know it's my account, and send the contents of the appropriately marked up email to the recipients. OK, fine. But now, allow me to assign sub-addresses. So, for example, if I email QWERTY.terry@mailservice.com, and I've already defined the address of terry, now I don't have to mark up my email at all. I just put QWERTY.terry@mailservice.com into my email address book, and my friend Terry is the same as contacting anybody else with email. With such a system, mailing somebody and emailing somebody take exactly the same steps on my part. In fact, I can even CC them on an email I send to somebody else.

:-)

In all seriousness, this is a good idea, but you might be cutting yourself short on the profits. 6 cents a letter for probably 5 minutes worth of work? I think you should charge $1.50 a letter and make about 56 cents instead. Overseas business people might still be willing to pay that.

I like the interface of your service!

www.mailaletter.com

None of the competing services that I know of provide an API, and if dcurtis releases an API that would be a significant edge.

At the time, it was several dollars per page.

I think Dustin's service is most suitable for occasional letter senders while PostalMethods is most suitable for businesses wanting to automate their mailing.

You could do what those efax places do for free faxes and include an advertisement in the envelope. Hell, put advertisements on the envelope itself.

http://localhost:3000/success?merchant_return_link=Return+to...

Edit: Also, a personalized handwriting font upload would be neat.

http://twitter.com/dcurtis/status/5187063511

2. I can also delete a lifetime of mail in 10 seconds. The steps required to redundantly store or back up data require either knowledge the layman doesn't have or expensive software (assuming they don't know of the free alternatives).

3. Letters are like books in that there will always be people who prefer the personal feel of paper and ink to a computer screen.

4. Agreed.

You seem to be assuming that his market is YC users or other techies. As stated in other comments, this has great applications for the elderly, non-techies, and people in other countries wanting to send mail to the US.

1. Politicians receiving mail from their constituents will take a snail mail more seriously than email.

2. Love letters seem more meaningful when received via snail mail.

It also leads indirectly to the fact that there's no spam filter for snail mail to get stuck in. Not because there's no spam in snail mail, but because the amount of spam is reasonable. 95% of email is spam, which is manageable for the user because of spam filters, but false positives in spam filters make snail mail actually a bit more reliable for the average recipient.

I have an aunt who snail mails a few photos of her family every now and then with a handwritten letter. She's been doing this for years. Yet, each year receiving the personal snail mail brings more excitement than the previous year!

I have elderly family that greatly prefers getting physical letters to email. I also do a lot of foreign travel, where it's inconvenient and expensive to send letters.

Snail is a definitely niche product, and only useful in weird edge cases. However, you might be surprised how many people encounter those edge cases on a daily basis.

You can argue over whether theses concerns are legit or solved problems, but at least people are unconvinced, or are otherwise reluctant to switch to digital.

Dustin's service doesn't solve that, but your comments are, quite simply, ahead of the game, and detached from current reality. That reality, as is always the way with reality, changing, but that change takes time.

EDIT: First paragraph re-written.

Despite its age and the fact that it is grossly inadequate, snail mail still has a place in our society - at least for now.

And the set of people I want to send mail to intersected with the set of people who have the faintest idea what public/private keys are is the empty set. So that won't fly.

In addition, the fact that I am willing to pay a dollar to send a message is a statement that you might want to take five seconds to look at the letter, whereas most emails aren't worth taking a look at.