Electronic postage - Buyers Guide

Home Office Computing, Jan, 2000 by David Haskin

New digital alternatives for communications that still require a stamp

FREQUENT TRIPS TO THE post office have always been a necessary yet time-consuming chore of doing business. But now, whether you use traditional mail for direct marketing, shipping packages, or simply paying bills, you can save time and gas money by using new electronic stamps and digital postal meters designed for small businesses and home offices.

Both types of products increase efficiency by making it first and easy to obtain postage and to add that postage to letters and packages. We looked at two of the first electronic-stamp products to be released, by E-Stamp and Stamps.com, and two state-of-the-art postal meters, Neopost's Simply Postage and Pitney Bowes's Personal Post Digital Postage Meter.

All four products require you to apply to the United States Postal Service (USPS) to receive postage electronically. After establishing an account, you can buy postage with the click of a button on your PC screen or on the postage meter. All the products then connect to a remote server to complete your purchase. Information such as how much postage you have remaining from your last purchase is stored on your PC, in a postage meter, or on the Internet, depending on which tool you're using.

With the electronic-stamp products and Simply Postage, you set the amount of postage, the class of service (such as first class or parcel post), and other shipping details through simple PC interfaces. The products then print postal indicia on either envelopes or labels. Like bar codes, indicia contain all the machine-readable information the USPS needs to process your mail. Pitney Bowes's digital Personal Post prints a more traditional postmark, and has no software component.

To test these new solutions, we established accounts with each of the vendors, applied to the USPS, and prepared postage for a variety of package and letter types. We also set up mass mailings with the products that supported them.

Each product type has its benefits. We find postage meters simpler to use because they aren't as weighed down by USPS regulations (see the sidebar "Going Postal"). However, electronic stamps let you use built-in address books to simultaneously print address labels and postage to many recipients in a single operation, making them more efficient for bulk mailings.

Both types of products offer different pricing schemes. Depending on your usage, one may be more or less expensive for you. Since prices are competitive, weigh your options and match a product to your specific needs.

E-Stamp

8.0

V      7
P      9
E      8
S      8

E-Stamp ($50 dongle rental, plus fees; 650554-8454, www.e-stamp, com) is one of a new breed of products that enables you to purchase postage directly over the Internet. This electronic-stamp service is really a dual solution, consisting of software and a dongle that connects to your PC's parallel port. The dongle is about half the size of a deck of cards and stores information about your account. After connecting the hardware dongle to the parallel port, you connect your printer cable to the dongle to print your stamps.

When we first launched the software, E-Stamp displayed dialog boxes that guided us through the USPS application process. The program requested basic information, such as our name, address, and how we preferred to pay (the USPS accepts credit cards and electronic funds transfers). Don't be intimidated by the onscreen warnings of possible wait time; we received permission within a day of application.

E-Stamp's interface is well-organized--all the elements you'll use are readily available. It's easy to get started, too: You click on buttons to select the class of service and envelope size, then type in your parcel's or envelope's weight. The program calculates the postage and gets you ready to print. By the time you read this, E-Stamp is scheduled to be selling a scale that attaches to the dongle, to save you from having to enter the item's weight manually and risk insufficient postage.

To buy more postage, you simply click on a toolbar button; the system then uses your Internet connection to tap the company's server, which has USPS approval to sell postage. Clicking on another button prints simple reports about how much postage you've purchased and used.

We typed addresses one at a time and used an address book to print several envelopes and labels with different addresses. E-Stamp verified all the addresses and showed a preview image of each piece of mail, including address and indicia, before giving us the option to print.

Unfortunately, we think E-Stamp botched the address book in this initial release. The program uses the address book included with Windows Messaging, an e-mail " client which, in turn, is included with Windows. However, Windows Messaging doesn't come preinstalled as part of Windows 98, so you must find your Win 98 CD-ROM and install it yourself. If you don't, you won't have an address book. An E-Stamp spokesperson says the company is fixing the problem.