Electronic postage - Buyers Guide

Home Office Computing, Jan, 2000 by David Haskin

RELATED ARTICLE: GOING POSTAL

The new electronic-stamp products will simplify life in many ways, but the United States Postal Service (USPS) has made sure they're not too convenient yet.

For starters, the USPS requires that electronic-stamp vendors check the quality of your printer. In the case of E-Stamp, that means printing a sample 33-cent stamp and mailing it to the company for verification.

The Postal Service also requires that electronic-stamp vendors store account information either on a separate hardware device that connects to your PC (such as E-Stamp's dongle), or on a secure Web server (as in the case of Stamps.com), not on your hard disk. If you are using a Web-based product, this means you must be connected to the internet before you can print any postage at all. This isn't easy in home offices where voice and data coexist on the same phone line.

There are also bureaucratic problems. Because these products require a match-up of your addresses to a USPS database of all U.S. addresses, you can be prevented from printing postage if your addresses don't match. And the USPS has mandated that you print indicia and addresses at the same time, meaning you can't preprint postage, which you can do with a conventional postage meter.

Finally, you are required to drop your electronically-stamped mail into a metered-mail mailbox. While this isn't a true inconvenience, it may trip you up if you are used to leaving your letters in your home mailbox.

RELATED ARTICLE: ON THE HORIZON

Pitney Bowes and Neopost are old-timers in the postage business, but newcomers Stamps.com and E-Stamp beat them to market with electronic-stamp products. However, both companies are making strides to catch up.

Neopost says it expects to ship its PC Stamp and PostagePlus PC electronic-postage products by the time you read this. PC Stamp works much like E-Stamp, using a hardware dongle that attaches to your PC's parallel port for storing account information. It will require the use of an address verification CD. PostagePlus will work just like Stamps.com, storing account and address verification on a secure Web server.

For its part, Pitney Bowes has announced ClickStamp Plus, which has a dongle, and ClickStamp Online, which works via the Internet. At press time, the products were in beta test in California and Washington, D.C.; as with Neopost's newcomers, other details, including prices, were not yet released.

If these postage products take off, expect aftermarket offerings to augment them. For instance, the Dymo-CoStar Label-Writer EL60 and LabelWriter Turbo ($200 and $250, respectively; 800-426-7827, www.labelwriter.com) label printers received USPS approval last summer to print postage when used with E-Stamp or Stamps.com software.

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