Send Postal Letters Anywhere in the World Through Internet - Email to Snail Mail

There are three reasons why you may want to send emails as paper letters using snail mail:

1. Some of your relatives live in remote villages where they don’t have computers let alone access to Internet.
2. Your grandparents know computers but they’ll probably feel more happy if you could send them emails and photographs in paper form that they can read in the lawn outside.
3. You are trying to reach someone who already gets a few hundred email messages per day. Your email may get lost in the clutter but if you take the snail mail approach, chances are high that he or she will at least read your message if not respond to it.

How to Send Email as Snail Mail?

Print your email message, insert it into an envelope, rush to the nearest post office, buy some postage stamps and drop the letter in a post box.

Well that’s one of the option but it involves too much work so we’ll shift attention to some automated email to snail mail services that enable us to send paper mail right from the computer at our home.

These web based letter printing and dispatching services work more or less the same way. You send then an email or upload the document as Word or PDF on to their servers, make the payment online and they’ll send the letter via regular postal mail to the specified physical address.

Email to Postal Mail Services - A Comparison

	Pricing	Colored Printing	Payment Options	What’s Unique?
Postal Methods	$1 for US addresses and $1.5 for international addresses	No	Credit Cards	More useful for bulk mails as price decreases with volume
Mail a Letter	$1 for US addresses and $2 for international addresses	Yes	Credit Cards, PayPal, Google Checkout	You can add a self addressed envelope with the letter
Postful	$1 for US addresses and $1.5 for international addresses	Yes	Credit Cards, PayPal, Google Checkout	You can send colored photos as postcards
EZGram	$1 for US addresses and $1.6 for non-US addresses	Yes	Credit Cards and PayPal	Supports USPS Priority Mail for quick delivery
L-Mail	Around $1 - depends on country	No	Credit Cards and Debit Cards	Supports Braille and audio letters
Click 2 Mail	Recommended for bulk mail	Yes	Credit Cards	Supports Product Flyers, Booklets and Postcards
Email 2 Postal	$1 for US addresses	No	Credit Cards	Supports handwritten envelopes and greeting cards
PC 2 Paper	$0.8 for UK and $1.5 for non-UK addresses	Yes	Credit Cards, Paypal and Nochex	Offers a real UK based postal address for incoming post

All the web based post mail services discussed above let you send letters from anywhere in the world to any other destination. There are some country specific services like Via Post (for UK), Pixel Letter (for European Union), Snail Mail Me (for Canada) and India Post (for residents of India) that may turn out to be cheaper if are sending letters to any of these countries.

Also, of the services listed above, only L-Mail has offices (or rather printing stations) in quite a few international locations (including Mumbai in India) and thus it can deliver mails more quickly (and cheaply) depending upon the destination address. And if you insist on sending colored letters or documents, Postful may be a good choice as they don’t charge extra for colored prints.

Related: Tools for a Paperless Office.

Update: I have removed eSnailer from the comparison chart - it’s a free ad supported email to post mail service for US addresses only but some users have reported issues with mail delivery.

Add Your Current Location to Gmail Signatures Automatically

Gmail users who travel frequently will simply love this. You can now instruct Gmail to automatically add your current geographic location to all your outgoing email messages so that recipients get to know where you are at the moment.

Gmail takes the IP address of the computer from where you are sending that email and uses it to determine the city / state / country from where you are writing that email.

How to Add Location in Gmail email Signatures

Step 1: Enable the Location in Signature module from the Lab Settings of your Gmail / Google Apps of Gmail.

Step 2: Open the Setting tab of Gmail and select the check box that says "Append your location to the signature".

That’s it. Here how the signature would look like on the recipients computer. So instead of saying "Sent from iPhone" or "Sent from BlackBerry", your email signatures could now says "Sent from New Delhi using iPhone" or something similar.(see update)

City detection based on IP addresses may not be 100% accurate but you can always modify the detected value before sending the email.

Marco Bonechi, the Google engineer who coded the Location module from Gmail, recommends using the location module with Google Gears for more accurate location detection since it uses wi-fi access point signals to recognize your current location.

Update: Gmail location signature is not available on mobile phone based browsers (like Opera Mini for BlackBerry) so you can’t have custom signatures for emails sent through mobile phones even if you use the regular Gmail interface.

Use the iPhone Camera to Identify Fonts Used in Print or Web Graphics

If you happen to come across some unique and interesting font in a magazine, web graphic or a billboard on the highway, here’s what you can do to find the name of that font:

Step 1. Download the WhatTheFont App from iTunes store - this is a free app and available for iPhone as well as iPod touch.

Step 2. Snap a photograph of that poster or magazine using the built-in camera of your iPhone. iPod touch users may use images saved from their emails. For web graphics, you may capture the iPhone screen and use that image with the WhatTheFont App.

Step 3. Confirm which characters are used in the image using the WhatTheFont app and you’ll quickly see a list of matching font names.

You can then either e-mail a link to a MyFonts page with more info on that font, or open it up in the iPhone’s built-in Safari web browser. Thanks Tina.

Create a Safe Senders List in Gmail Similar to Outlook

Dean recently lost his web domain as all the renewal email reminders from his registrar were getting marked as spam and, unfortunately, Dean did not care to check his spam folder.

We can’t really blame Dean for this because if someone receives a few hundred spam email messages in a day, it’s not always possible to manually review each and every mail in the junk list just to filter out the false positives.

What we therefore need is some sort of safe senders list or a white list of email addresses (and web domains) that should not be marked as spam by your email service.

Outlook Style Junk Email Filters in Gmail

Microsoft Outlook includes some excellent filtering options to help you minimize the risk of important emails getting marked as spam. Let’s see how we can go about implementing Outlook like safe filters in Gmail.

Safe Senders List - A list of domain names and e-mail addresses that you want to receive messages from.

Let’s say you want to create a white list in gmail such that none of the following emails are ever marked as spam:

• All mails that have an edu in the sender’s address. (top level domain)
• You work for xyz.com and don’t want to see mails from your boss or colleagues in the junk folder ever. (individual domain names)
• Notification emails from Godaddy (specific email addresses)

You can put all this information in the From field of Gmail folder separated by the boolean OR operator and check the box that says "Never Send it to Spam".

Tomorrow if you want to whitelist another domain or email address, simple modify the above filter and append the new names using the same OR operator.

Safe Recipients List - A list of email mailing lists and domain names that you belong to and want to receive messages from.

Sometimes emails sent to a mailing list may get marked as spam in Gmail as you’re not in the To: or CC: list. To avoid such a situation, you may add that mailing list address to your address book (or contacts list) and Gmail is unlikely to mark emails with that address as spam.

Alternatively, you can create a fool proof safe recipients list (as shown above) but now put the safe addresses in the To: field of your Gmail filter.

Blocked Senders List - A list of domain names and e-mail addresses that you want to be blocked.

If you want to block all emails that are either sent from a particular domain (say .ru or mtv.com) or the message is sent using some specific email address, use the following filter:

Matches: from:(.ru OR mtv.com OR spammer@xyz.com)
Do this: Skip Inbox, Delete it

This filter is really handy for blocking emails that may be from legitimate sources but don’t have the "unsubscribe" link - like that newsletter from MTV.

Imagine if the Colors of Google Logo Start Dripping Down..

If the Google logo was painted on a wall and the colors start dripping down, you’ll probably get a pattern like the one below

Incase you have trouble viewing the above Google animation, here’s a still snapshot.

French graffiti artist Zevs who has earlier liquidated the logo images of some big brands, including that of McDonalds, Apple and Coca Cola, has now liquified the Google logo in his latest work.

The melting Google logo is on display at Gzzglz.com as a Flash based animation. Gzzglz, which is the actually derived from the word Google ("e" replaced with "z"), is a clone of the Google website and the links are cleverly written such that they resemble the Google search pages. [via]

Remap any Unused or Faulty Keyboard Keys with Sharp Keys

If some of the important keys on your computer keyboard have stopped working or if you are using a laptop with a cramped keyboard and like to reassign the Function (Fn) and other lesser-used keys to something more useful, try Sharp Keys.

Sharp Keys is a free Windows utility that lets you remap or even reassign computer keyboard keys. Here are some sample scenarios where this keyboard remapping utility will come handy:

1. To change the default behavior of a key by mapping that key to any other key - e.g. you could remap Caps Lock to a Shift key

2. For reassigning keys - if the Shift key is not working on your computer, you may reassign the Caps Lock key as Shift and map F12 for Caps Lock.

3. To create missing keys - if your netbook keyboard doesn’t include multimedia keys, you may assign F11/F12 key as media volume buttons.

4. To permanently disable certain keys on the keyboard - some admins like to disable the Print Screen key to prevent people from clicking desktop screenshots..

To select the to and from keys, you can either directly use the keyboard or select from a list of 104 predefined keys. SharpKeys writes these settings directly to the Windows registry, so you just need to run it once and reboot your computer.

SharpKeys runs on Windows Vista/XP/2000 and requires administrative rights.