

Dustin Curtis's new web app - dougp
http://snail.dustincurtis.com/

======
ryanwaggoner
There's a bunch of these services out there, but here's a couple that may be
interesting:

<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.

~~~
mrduncan
Compared to Dustin's though, both of those hurt my eyes to look at. This
reminds me of Posterous, blogging is a crowded market but they differentiated
themselves by being beautiful and dead simple. Competitors are good, it just
proves that there's a market for a service like this.

~~~
diN0bot
beauty and pain are in the eye of the beholder...

~~~
techiferous
Up to a point... <http://www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/>

(warning: autoplay music)

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zaidf
I wish I could mail myself a note on a certain date. Would be cool to receive
a one year old note from myself next year.

~~~
axod
Could be a real market for that...

"Ensure you receive at least ONE brithday card, by sending it youself! By the
time your birthday comes round you'll have forgotten you sent it, and will be
pleasantly surprised."

Also things like sending letters a year on, with a reminder of what you hoped
to achieve that year etc.

~~~
WesleyJohnson
I was thinking along the same lines. There are already services for sending
emails into the future (futureme.org is one), but I think being able to do it
with actual mail is a clever idea.

One commercial use might be for real estate agents sending letters to new
homeowners 1/2 months into the future asking them how they're doing, etc. I
think that would seem a bit more personal than just an email. I always enjoy
it when I start receiving mail at a new residence!

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notaddicted
Somebody has to say it:

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.

~~~
megaduck
And yet despite all of those factors, I'll be using Snail.

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.

~~~
senko
An interesting extension to the snail mail services would be to snap/upload a
photo, use geolocation to find the user's current location and automatically
send postcards "from" anywhere in the world.

I always send my postcards the last day and then hunt for the stamps and post
box/office where I can send them from. I'd really find this service useful :)
Although, arguably a big part of receiving a postcard is the stamp which you
wouldn't have here.

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robotrout
I've just been pondering such a service, as the result of a friend of mine,
being moved to an assisted living facility. He has no email there, and
wouldn't be able to use it if he did. I would love to send him quick updates
on my life and my kids, but, while I could spare him five minutes to dash off
an email and attach some photos to it, the task of printing the photos on a
color printer, finding his address, etc., usually gets the task
procrastinated, sometimes for weeks, in that "I'll do it tomorrow"
procrastination dance.

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.

------
kaffeinecoma
If this gets popular, you could hire a few helpers to handle the
printing/mailing. The job ad could go something like "Work from home. Get paid
to stuff envelopes!"

:-)

~~~
SlyShy
Yeah, the service could be distributed so that the letters can be printed and
mailed by any number of people.

~~~
gsiener
Even better, you could distribute the mailing by geography to minimize
shipping time. If it's close you could even have them deliver in person and
save 44c. (Did you just invent a new postal system?)

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Everest
A couple thoughts 1). I usually love Dustin's work but am acutally
underwhelmed by the design. I hate the black on white. It hurts my eyes 2.)
Snail mail is meaningful becasue it shows that the person took time to WRITE
and then send a letter. Its not nearly as meaningful if its typed up.

~~~
mkyc
Dear downvoters,

In this community, we don't vote based on whether or not we agree. We vote up
if we think it is worth reading, regardless of whether we agree or not. We
downvote when the message is inappropriate - flames and trolls, cheap humor,
that sort of thing. I don't go to the comments to see who agrees with me, I go
there to see who disagrees, and why.

Sincerely,

mkyc

~~~
techiferous
Upvoted because I agree with you.

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kevinholesh
Perfect! Now no one will see me when I send my "Dear Penthouse" letters...

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.

~~~
antidaily
"I never thought this could happen to me..."

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jrockway
How many death threats has this service sent so far? There should be a counter
for that at the bottom of the page.

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Jakob
In Germany the official post office provides this service for 1,90 Euros
(stamp costs 0,55 Cents). <https://www.schreibcenter.de/schreibcenter/>

I like the interface of your service!

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YuriNiyazov
There's another competitor that wasn't mentioned:

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.

~~~
andreyf
PostalMethods has an API: <http://www.postalmethods.com/postal-api>

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spicyj
The ability to send a PDF would be nice, so I know exactly what the printed
product will look like, and I can use my own fonts if I like.

~~~
symptic
Seconded, although that would take away from how straightforward the service
is.

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RiderOfGiraffes
I suppose if the service gets popular you'll have to find some way to make it
pay, otherwise it will cost you a fortune in stamps. Any plans? Or is it "Wait
and see.." ??

~~~
dcurtis
Well, the dollar breaks down like this:

* 10c to paypal

* 44c to stamp

* 40c for envelope and paper

I make about 6c on each letter.

~~~
natfriedman
It's really a shame that paypal makes more than you do. Are there any payment
gateways that are better for low-price transactions than paypal?

~~~
cpach
I don't think it's all about costs. One great benefit of PayPal is that it's a
known and (somewhat?) trustworthy brand. (Yes, I know, it's far from
perfect...)

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bprater
Build a API dude. This type of service can be useful to some of us who need to
send snail mail to customers when they sign-up, cancel, etc. And I agree with
everyone else about the prices. Eventually 6c won't cut it and then you'll
have to jerk the price up. $1 sounds sexy, but you need to eat.

~~~
dcurtis
Well I just built this for fun, and I will definitely end up in the red
overall.

How many people would use a physical mailing service like this, if it had an
API and lots of options for paper and envelopes?

~~~
SlyShy
I'd use it for just about everything. I hate sending letters, but I do really
enjoy writing to people. Making the system fully automated would be cool on a
number of levels.

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SlyShy
Interesting. I wonder if dcurtis would mind describing some details of the
operation. Is the postage being printed too, or are stamps being affixed some
other way? And I guess someone is still delivering the mail to a box or post
office--would that get annoying?

~~~
dcurtis
I had a beagleboard (beagleboard.org) sitting around in my closet, so I
figured I should do something with it.

When you create a letter on Snail, the beagleboard pulls from the heroku
database, formats the letter, prints it, and then sends me an email saying
it's ready to be stuffed into an envelope.

(Well... sort of. In a perfect world, that is what would happen.
Unfortunately, there are some bugs that I am still trying to work out.)

~~~
jeremymcanally
You should invest in a cheap trifold folder and an envelope/postage printer
(or envelope tray for your existing, presumably laser, printer). That would
cut down your operations time _a lot_ if it gets popular.

Though, I think big, sooo probably not worth the cash.

~~~
percept
I've always wondered what Netflix does. Is their DVD handling/mailing a manual
process?

~~~
philwelch
Pretty much, you can't trust users to send DVD's back in the mailing envelopes
in any kind of reliable state (at all, one to an envelope, with the barcode
facing out the window, with the correct disc in the correct slipcover, with
the disc in any slipcover) so they have assembly lines of people to tear the
envelopes open, check the right DVD is in the right slipcover, and so forth.

~~~
percept
Thanks. Is that posted somewhere? Is shipping out to customers more automated?

I always wonder about stuff like that.

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byteCoder
This reminds me of the service from the 1980s (was it Sprint Mail?) where you
could dial up (over a 300 Baud modem), type a letter, and it would be
physically mailed to an address.

At the time, it was several dollars per page.

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AmyHanes
That's a nice and simplistic interface however I've been using PostalMethods
(<http://www.postalmethods.com>) for awhile and they offer an email interface
and a Web Service API (<http://www.postalmethods.com/postal-api>) for a
cheaper price when sending regularly. They also support postcards.

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

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paraschopra
Is it just for US? Or can one send letters all around the world?

~~~
dcurtis
I'll only send letters _to_ the US, but you can obviously order letters to be
sent _from_ anywhere in the world.

~~~
neelesh
May be franchise your service to other HN'ers in other countries? :)

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mel_llaguno
The problem with your business model is that you will not really make any
money with a 6% margin. How about this? Start out with $2 a letter, then give
bulk discounts based on the volume of mail sent. It seems that a lot of the
comments here suggest that the API would be useful in a MASS mailling
campaign. Your pricing should reflect this requirement without breaking the
bank. Single letter users will in effect subsidize the mass mailers.

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agazso
Love the glowing aura around text boxes. Beautiful design.

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djb_hackernews
Wild, so he is actually folding, stuffing, and licking the stamp? At 6
cents/per he'd need over 100 mailings/hr to come out around minimum wage. I
like the API idea, pdf idea, maybe .doc files.

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.

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shawndumas
FYI: The return from paypal is broke...

[http://localhost:3000/success?merchant_return_link=Return+to...](http://localhost:3000/success?merchant_return_link=Return+to+dustincurtis.com)

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

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adityakothadiya
What about privacy? So looks like this isn't useful for sending private and
serious mails.

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Huppie
I actually wonder what is faster. Sending a snail-mail using regular airmail
towards the US or sending one through this service :) At least it's 30%
cheaper and saves me the time of formatting a letter and walking to the mail-
office.

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zaidf
Now you just gotta wait for google adsense to subsidize snail mail.

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grinich
Hopefully he doesn't send swine flu to everybody!

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

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neelesh
It would be great if I can select a template for my mail.Definitely not on the
landing page, it would clutter such a nice and clean page. May be a 'More...'
option?

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ananthrk
Looks beautiful.

Sorry to nitpick. But, in the preview letter page, it reads "Ma _k_ e a
mistake?". It should instead read "Ma _d_ e a mistake?"

~~~
jlees
[Did you] make a mistake? is kind of valid, no? Casual, but acceptable.

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zhyder
Looks slick. Minor issue with Safari/Webkit's resizable text area feature
though: you can resize a text area beyond the fancy border surrounding it.

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catch23
How about an api so that we can script it? ;-)

Would make it a lot easier for Amnesty International. All that handwriting
makes my hand numb!

~~~
adelevie
talk about coincidence!

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mcantelon
Great idea. I hate the hassle of sending physical mail the $1 is well worth
it. Do you/will you offer the service to/from/within Canada?

~~~
kyro
Yeah, I was inquiring about international mailing, but from what the footer
says, it's only limited to the US.

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symptic
I can see this being very useful for businesses wanting statements and
comments for the record.

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fredBuddemeyer
more useful and unique (?) would be the ability to receive snail mails and
truly interface with the snail world. requires a lot more (like a mechanical
turkish army in different postal jurisdictions) but worth a lot more.

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chrischen
Hey cool I had this idea once.

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adelevie
keep an online archive of threaded conversations.

------
adelevie
Where's the API?

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bhseo
Related thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=915000>

