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For those of you who don't know. Snail Mail is the "techy" term for sending a letter via normal postal mail (yes you have to put a stamp on it and it usually costs you money).
It appears there are 3 websites that offer this service there used to be only 2 at one stage. I decided to take a little peak at them and see what they had to offer.
The three websites are www.pc2paper.co.uk ,www.l-mail.com and www.netgram.com .
While I didn't spend any money on these service (may do this later) I decided to take a quick look and compare them. I am not a fan of snail mail and prefer email, however sending a letter to Aunty Dorris who doesn't have a clue about computers, from the Internet could prove useful sometime. I didn't have enough time to wright about netgram if anyone has any comments on them please post away!
PC2Paper while not as impressive in its appearance as Web2Snail still had a professional air to it and worked in my Firefox browser, I was very interested that they had an online help avatar called Lora (I'm a geek!). PC2Paper appear to have a very detailed cost break down of how much the items of stationery you use in your letter costs right down to how much it weighs! While they don't have as many stationery options as Web2Snail they seem to focus more on a low cost service. PC2Paper post to all destinations world wide.
A check on the web wayback machinehttp://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.pc2paper.co.uk revealed they had been around since 21 June 2003.
How it works: They offer letter sending through the same style interface as web2snail along with needing to sign up for an account with them which you top up with cash, the only difference being they had an editor that worked for Firefox which is always a surprise on these types of sites. PC2Paper also have an online address book and a general chat area for their users and gave the feeling they had been a round for a while. PC2Paper was different in that they accept PayPal and Nochex as methods of payment as well as the normal cards.
L-mail appear to be the newby here and they have started quite a large publicity campaign to make people aware of them. They have a professional look and feel to them and look like they will be a serrious competitor for the other three. L-mail like PC2Paper offer posting to all destinations worldwide and have several printing stations in 5 countries to make them cheaper on some destinations than the other three.
A check on the web way back machinehttp://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.l-mail.com shows the first entry for 01 December 2003 to a holding page, however they only officially lauched in Septemeber this year.
How it works: L-mail offer a bare bones mail sending service with no account option meaning no address book (according to the site this is coming soon) because of a no account feature sometimes L-mails prices can be higher than the other providers as you have to make single transactions for small amounts on your debit or credit card and depending if you pay by debit or credit card the price is either higher or lower. The rich text editor was nice however I couldn't get it to work in Firefox
L-mail appear to be pushing toward the bigger business market and are currently working on an API to allow back end integrations
