Got a cool letter or invitation to send that could use some pizazz? Design blog Ragehaus has a great how-to for creating your own wooden wax seal, to give your snail mail letters an even more historical look than they already have.
This year, 2010 — it’s the year you will not let bills pile up and junk mail overrun your desk. Grab some fabric, borrow a sewing machine, and craft a mail organiser for a door or wall in your house.
Declining postal volumes are one reason Australia Post wants to put up the price of stamps, but it’s also trying to encourage people to send more mail, and offering a free set of electronic scales to anyone who registers for its Click and Send service is one way of doing that.
Lest you worry that Click And Send sounds like some dodgy campaign that will encourage junk mail, it’s a service that lets you fill out the paperwork for goods being sent overseas online, and then either have them picked up by a courier or posted via your local office. It’s free to sign up for, and would be handy for businesses, eBay addicts and people with overseas relatives, while the scales giveaway is running until September 20. Picture by czardases
Click And Send [via OzBargain]
Australia Post is contemplating putting up the price of stamps for the second time in a year. But just how important is the basic postal service these days?
I’m generally pretty organised with my email, and I like to have nothing in my inbox except stuff I haven’t acted on yet. However, a spurt of recent travel and work commitments meant I’d fallen into a familiar but dangerous pattern: grabbing information from emails I needed (and replying when necessary), but not filing or deleting them, and not checking out stuff that didn’t look urgent. The end result: I suddenly had 1328 emails in my inbox, and 401 of them hadn’t even been read. Sounds like a nightmare, but in reality it only took me an hour to get my inbox back under control.
Windows only: ChromeMailer, a free email utility for users of Google’s Chrome browser, pops open a Gmail compose window by default when you click an email address in Chrome. Actually, ChromeMailer seems to replace the default mailto: handler at the system level, so it’s advised only for fans of Gmail’s web interface. While ChromeMailer is potentially very useful, there are two big caveats: It requires an up-to-date .NET installation in Windows XP, and Windows Vista makes you answer a User Account Control nag on every click. If you’re more a Firefox fan looking for a similar fix, try our previous method for integrating Gmail into your browser. ChromeMailer is a free download for Windows systems only. Thanks, How-To Geek! ChromeMailer [Skaelede.hu]
Web site WebToMail sends full web pages to your email on demand. Why? Let’s say, for example, you’re sitting behind a nasty internet filter at work that won’t even let you access your friendly, productivity-enhancing Lifehacker. Just fire off an email to send@webtomail.co.cc with the URL of the web page you want in the subject (http://lifehacker.com.au). A few minutes later, you’ll receive an email back from WebToMail with the contents of the URL you requested conveniently embedded in the email. The results vary depending on the email client you’re using; in Gmail, you don’t get nicely styled CSS, but you do in desktop apps like Thunderbird. Seems like a worthwhile utility to add to your IT lockdown toolbox.
It’s hardly a new option, but I’ve got to give the thumbs up to Australia Post’s Express Post Platinum, which got me out of a document delivery jam yesterday when a rather more expensive courier company simply failed to show up to pick up some visa-related material. For just $12.20, I sent the document at the nearest post office in Adelaide, and the online tracker let me keep tabs on it until it got to its destination this morning in Sydney. While it’s almost a cliché to diss the PO for its poor service, in this instance it managed the rare combination of cheaper and better.
