Topic: Troubleshooting / Forum Problem: Can't use OpenID

Thanks. I’ll keep you updated.

Topic: Troubleshooting / Forum Problem: Can't use OpenID

Okie Dokie.
Advise when it’s fixed or circumvented and I’ll test it out.

Topic: Troubleshooting / Forum Problem: Can't use OpenID

Unfortunately, it seems there’s a problem in the forum system we’re using (at least other sites on the same system are having the same problem). If we can’t get this solved, I’ll temporarily disable openid (an ugly solution, I know) until we can either dig in the code to fix this ourselves or just switch over to a different forum system or version.

Topic: Troubleshooting / Cutoff Times Unavailable until creation

Eric,

I like that suggestion. Not only would it help in situations like yours, it would also help to make it a little bit more clear to people exactly what’s going on in terms of our process.

Topic: Troubleshooting / Forum Problem: Can't use OpenID

I see I confused you with the John Galt reference: See Wikipedia on Ayn Rand.

Actually I did confuse you as you forgot to answer my question about OpenID’s. Hint, Hint, . . .

Topic: Troubleshooting / Cutoff Times Unavailable until creation

Justin,

Thanks for your reply. The information you gave makes sense and will make the service more useful. I am excited about using the service more and more, and am giving references to anyone who will listen.

A Suggestion (hopefully easy): I have my account set to auto approve. But it sounds like I would have better control if it was set to manual. The problem is that sometimes (actually often) I like to email/correspond, then go out the door to appointments with little time between. That means that I can’t always be there to confirm. So I set to it auto. But read on . . .

Although, many times I am there. And it would be nice to have a “CONFIRM” link on the “we’re sending unless you cancel” email preview. That way I could approve up to noon (even though I have it set to auto) and still have expectations that the letter would go out that day.

Cheers!

Topic: Troubleshooting / Cutoff Times Unavailable until creation

Eric,

I’ll update the site to give more detail on how this works. Let me answer your questions here as well.

First off, on the mailing time. The dispatch for printing occurs at 1200 PDT. However, there is a minimum 2 hour window built in to allow time to preview a letter and cancel if necessary. This pushes things back to 1000 PDT. However, if you have your account set to require manual confirmation (where letters don’t automatically go out unless canceled but rather don’t go out until confirmed), you can confirm a letter any time before 1200 PDT and it will go out that day.

Second, our mailings all currently go out from Los Angeles, CA. We’re looking at adding separate print centers, but that won’t be happening until the end of the year at the earliest.

Topic: Troubleshooting / Forum Problem: Can't use OpenID

Eric,

I’m looking into this. Sorry for the delay, the forum has been a bit quiet and I’d been remiss in checking up over here.

-Justin

Topic: Troubleshooting / Forum Problem: Can't use OpenID

I set up https://me.yahoo.com/xxxxxxxx OpenID, and it is active on yahoo.

When I put the OpenID server address (above with the correct id in place of xxxxxxxx) in the box to logon to Postful, the Postful forum server tells me that the OpenID server cannot be found. Yet it’s there. . . I can see it from the Yahoo webcam. . . blinking away. (besides being able to ping it at 68.180.220.63)

How can you use an OpenID you already have? Is this broken? Did I not do something correctly? Is the internet broken between Postful and Yahoo? Will we have world peace? Who is John Galt?

Thanks!
—eric

Topic: How Do You Use Postful? / Use with Public Entity Board of Directors Correspondence

We use postful.com to send out board correspondence to the only rural holdout who is a member of the board.

All members of the board receive and use email except one. This one stoically refuses to use email.

There are several documents a month that must be delivered to board members, and while most of the members receive them via email effectively this one member cannot receive them in this manner.

We previously printed the correspondence, and did the whole mailing thing, which takes 5-10 minutes plus postage plus envelopes and paper.

Now we can “email” this one board member at a postful.com address and have the documents delivered to him easily with no other action on our part.

Excellent service. I would have done it myself if I wasn’t so busy!

Topic: Troubleshooting / Cutoff Times Unavailable until creation

Sending a letter today at 10:30am, I was hopeful for it to be sent along with a previous letter that was scheduled to be dispatched at 12:00pm, but instead this second letter was scheduled for tomorrow at 8am.

It would be helpful to know the cutoff times for printing (and the subsequent mailing times) BEFORE sending a letter.

It would also be helpful to know the time zone and location of the mailings, as this would help in estimating levels of service and expectation. This information is curiously missing from the website (when most sites are pretty specific about server time, or allow the user to set their timezone.)

I am assuming that the times are west coast, given the location of the authors and the website registration, and that the location of mailing could be either Seattle or Los Angeles, but the point is, I don’t know for sure.

Topic: How Do You Use Postful? / Use with my Healthcare Practice

I’d really like to start using postful for dictating letters to referring doctors (would love to use jott.com).

A quick email with information needed is slick and easy to do.

The only problem I see right now with emailing postful is putting a date on the letter and having photos put in a specific spot in the letter.

I eagerly await the first test letter to show up.

Art

Topic: Feature Requests / Volume Pricing?

We are finalizing this right now and should be announcing in the next week. Feel free to e-mail me directly and I’ll send you the numbers we’re looking at.

Topic: Feature Requests / Volume Pricing?

I’m wondering if you have volume pricing worked out. What if I send a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand letters per week?

Topic: Feature Requests / ICC profile?

We don’t have an ICC profile available yet. So far we’ve been mixing outsourcing and in-house production which has made it difficult to offer a single profile. As we stabilize some of this, we’ll be making color information available.

However if you (or anyone else reading this) have an application where you require precise color control, let me know the details and we can probably set things up for you now.

Topic: Feature Requests / ICC profile?

Since one of the applications you list is for printing photos embedded in letters, I’m curious if you have an ICC profile that we can use to match our calibrated monitors to your printer output.

Topic: Feature Requests / Mail merge?

Wow, that’s a sticky one. On the simple level of just search/replace a mail merge is relatively trivial, but gets complicated because of disparate data sources, document types, handling of invalid and missing fields (even the simple example of the always-optional address line #2 means everything might need to be shifted).

There’s no shortcut solution, though, and even a web-based reimplementation would be somewhat ugly and by necessity more limited than what you can do in Word or OpenOffice.

I’m thinking client-side additions (you can write extensions to Word, right?) that’d extend the mail merge process to do this properly… that seems like the only really smooth solution. You’d basically just need to write out the same old merged result file, but also a mapping file for which page needs to be mailed to what address… then the user could upload both and go on their merry way (or write the upload into the extension…). It wouldn’t help users w/o Windows & MS Word, alas (I fall in that camp), though I suspect that vast majority of the business users seeking mail merge will meet that criterion.

Cheers!
Rob

Topic: Feature Requests / Tracking sent mail

Are you interested in delivery confirmation or the Planet Code/Intelligent Mail tracking?

Topic: Feature Requests / Tracking sent mail

I would also like to possibly get USPS tracking numbers into this service. Possibly as an optional fee and setting?

Topic: Feature Requests / Mail merge?

Adam,

Sorry for the delay getting back to you on this. We are planning on adding mail merge options, but it’s not scheduled to be in testing until early next year. If you could let me know a little bit more about your application, I could give you a better answer on the easiest way to handle the integration in the meantime. If you’d prefer to discuss directly, feel free to contact me at jgarten [at] postful-inc.com.

-Justin

Topic: Feature Requests / Mail merge?

The service looks fantastic; I’m sending a great deal of direct mail (30-40 a day sometimes), and Postful’s API would make my life MUCH easier.

My question: What’s the easiest way to do a mail merge? I suppose I could write something to make word print a separate pdf for every entry and send them all separately, but that seems like lot of work … is any such feature planned for the immediate future?

Thanks,

-Adam Klein
Law Offices of Adam J. Klein, LLC

Topic: Tips and Tricks / PDF Attachments

We definitely encourage people to use PDF for the best control of the design. Our production process uses PDF all the way through so it’s the best way to control exactly what goes to press.

As for a Postful print driver… no timeline yet, but it will be coming.

Topic: Tips and Tricks / PDF Attachments

Well, here’s an obvious one—every Windows user should have PDFCreator installed. It’s free (open source), and just adds “PDFCreator” to your list of printers, so anytime you print something from any program, you can save it as a PDF instead of sending it to your actual printer.

OS X users have this feature built-in (check your printer dialog next time you print—there’s a checkbox), so you can do the same thing. Users of OpenOffice on any OS also have their own PDF button, so that’s one fewer step.

Anyway, I use it all the time—receipts for any online payment, documents destined for Postful, or anything else I would have printed out a few years ago… now it’s all saved as PDF, organized nicely, and backed up, instead of wasting paper and slipping down back behind my desk.

As far as Postful goes, I’ve been using only PDF; I know other formats are accepted, but it feels safer to print to PDF first (and see exactly how it’s going to turn out) rather than emailing it off and hoping the pages break where I’m hoping they will, margins aren’t mangled, fonts are all supported, etc.. Plus, I don’t need to look up to see if you handle a particular kind of document… as long as the application can print it, I can send it as PDF.

The next logical step should be “Print to Postful”—instead of the PDF save location, the dialog would ask for the address line… now that would be slick.

Topic: Announcements / Mailing Time Correction

Letters sent out this Monday (October 15) were incorrectly marked as not having mailed until Tues (October 16). We apologize for any confusion this might have caused. We’ve changed our procedure for updating production information to avoid a repeat of this.

Topic: Feature Requests / widgets

Widgets are definitely on the way. No timeline yet, but we want to make it trivial for people to integrate Postful and mail into other contexts.