Going Postal With Your Ink-Jet Printer

Home Office Computing, April, 1999 by David Haskin

Stamps.com 7.5

Requirements    Win/Mac, 16MB of RAM, 300dpi or greater
                ink-jet or laser printer, Internet
                connection

List Price      Software is free; postage price to be
                determined

Publisher       Stamps.com, 888-434-0055, www.stamps.com

You buy software, hardware, even your favorite books online, so why can't you stamp your mail and small packages as well? Beginning in June, Stamps.com will offer an online service that lets you acquire postage via the Internet and print it on envelopes and labels with an ink-jet printer.

The Stamps.com program is available as a free download from the company's Web site (www.stamps.com).

Although the software is free, final pricing wasn't set at press time. Stamps.com says it will charge either a flat rate between $3 and $5 per month or a 10 percent premium on purchased postage. By comparison, renting a postage meter costs about $25 monthly.

After installation, you provide credit card information and complete an online form applying for a U.S. Postal Service license to use this new type of service. After approval, which Stamps.com promises within 24 hours, you purchase postage simply by clicking a toolbar button and specifying the amount. Stamps.com accesses your account information via the Internet and applies the charge to your credit card.

Another toolbar button displays a dialog box from which you select a type of service, such as first class delivery, and print the postal mark. The mark has a bar code and states the amount of postage, postage class, and date. Stamps.com says you'll be able to add postage from within Microsoft Word and other word processors when you print envelopes and labels, but that feature wasn't ready in the version we reviewed.

The only annoyance we found was that Stamps.com must adhere to a postal service requirement that you provide the recipient's name and address before printing postage, which means you can't preprint postage. Overall, though, Stamps.com is a convenient and simple way to avoid wasting time standing in post office lines.