For those of you who will be attending the Graph Expo conference in Chicago next week, drop us a note.  We’d love to meet up with as many Postful users as possible!

Over the next week, we’re going to be adjusting the time at which letters are dispatched for printing.  After the transition, all letters will be dispatched at 1AM PST, Monday through Friday.  This change will allow us to more easily handle volume spikes and avoid mailing delays as volumes continue to expand.

Please let us know if you have any questions about this change.

Just a brief reminder that another minor postal holiday is almost here. Tomorrow, October 13, is Columbus Day (don’t worry, we didn’t remember either until our holiday notice came up). Any letters or postcards which would have normally gone out tomorrow will instead be mailed on Tuesday, October 14.

I know I’ll be out singing traditional Columbus Day carols (my favorites include “Scurvy like you mean it”, “Spice Girls”, and “White Christmas”).

One of the key questions many clients ask us when signing up is for details on volume discounts.  Volume discounts are now available for all users, vastly expanding the range of mailings for which Postful is appropriate.

Discounts are based on the size of the payment.  For example, a user adding $100 would see the price of a single page letter drop from $.99 to $.89 for the next $100 of orders.

Postful has always been the best deal available for individual mailings, now we’re able to extend that to much larger runs.  Combined with our unmatched integration options and ease of use, we think that this will open up a lot of new uses.

The biggest feature we’re launching this week is the addition of postcards.  It’s now easy to send custom postcards with your own photos and designs.

To try things out, just go to our site, upload a photo, and add your message.  You can preview the card, set the recipient, and send in minutes.  It’s only $.59 for a single 4.25″x6″ card.  Volume discounts take things down from there.

It’s a great way to send reminders, thank you notes, vacation postcards, holiday cards, and more.

Of course, for many of you, sending individual cards isn’t your key concern.  You want to integrate this directly with your application.  Through our API, you have full control of the postcard printing system, including complete control of the design on both sides of the card (both sides full color).

If you’re interested in getting more details, just contact us and we can help you to handle the integration process.

For everyone, let us know what you like and, just as importantly, what you don’t like.  We’re looking forward to hearing from you.

By now, many of you have noticed the major changes with Postful.  We’re thrilled to be launching out of beta this week at the Office 2.0 conference where we’re one of the Launchpad companies.

We’ll be talking a lot more about the new features that we’re launching over the next few days.  For now, let me just start by thanking all of the users who have helped us so much through the course of our beta development.  Your feedback, patience, support, and excitement have been invaluable.

And, I’d like to also welcome all the new users who are joining us for the first time.  We look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Just a reminder to those of you outside the US (or those in the US who don’t work for the federal government), Labor Day is on Monday (September 1).  As this is a US postal holiday, all weekend orders will go out on Tuesday instead.

Enjoy the BBQs (or whatever else you have planned)!

While I’m sad to say that this isn’t one of the new features we will be announcing next week, it’s still a cool extension of print concepts.

Expanding 3D printing technologies (often used for rapid prototyping) from plastics to concrete, a USC group in conjunction with Caterpillar is testing a system to ‘print’ homes.  Once available, it should be able to print out a full house in hours.

We’ve been working on some major updates recently, and we’re excited to say that we’ll be announcing them in just a little over a week at the Office 2.0 conference.

Aside from the obvious draw that Postful provides, there is an incredible group of panelists and speakers lined up.  More, there are going to be a lot of people that we’re looking forward to meeting in person after long online interactions.

There are still some spots remaining, so if you have a chance, register now.  Ismael Ghalimi and his team are putting together what looks to be a wonderful program, but it’s always the community that defines any conference, so we’d love to see as many of you there as possible.

For those who can’t make it, we’ll be posting updates here as well.

Many of you are sending your letters using PDFs or Word docs in order to gain better control over design, fonts and layout. But since the default has been to also print the body of the email, if present, this has led to some problems. Free email accounts add advertising. Many businesses and law firms have required notices which are appended. While we’ve worked to filter these out, this is not always successful.

To make this easier, we now offer the option to simply ignore all email message bodies. This means that only attachments will be printed. You can access this feature by going to your account preferences page. Just select the “ignore email bodies” option.