PostalMethods: An API for Automating Snail Mail

Kevin Farnham, July 25th, 2008   Comments(0)

PostalMethods is a service that frees businesses from needing their own staff to mail out invoices, confirmations, and other messages via printed postal mail. The service is available using standard email software, but PostalMethods also offers an API that enables businesses to integrate their postal mailing service directly into automated business processes.

The service makes it effortless to post invoices, send confirmations, or send any other type of message via postal mail (”snail mail”). Additionally, letters can easily be generated from any online service or legacy application. No more manual printing, folding, inserting, sealing, stamping, or delivering. PostalMethods does it all for you.

The PostalMethods API provides options to use SOAP or REST for requests with response data in XML. Given that this is an enterprise-grade service, often delivering critical, confidential information, SSL is supported.

The API provides methods for sending letters, getting the status of a letter, getting the PDF file that was used to create a letter, and cancelling a letter’s delivery. The PostalMethods API documentation is thorough, and includes a Quick Start Guide, a Developer’s Guide, and a complete Reference Manual. In addition, Code samples are available that demonstrate using the API in diverse environments such as .NET, Java, PHP, and ColdFusion, with more to come. A forum is available for asking questions and finding answers.

There are many advantages to outsourcing business activities which are not a company’s core business. PostalMethods lends businesses a hand, enabling them to reduce the effort for paper mailings to a few simple calls to an API.

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