CANADIAN MAIL TEMPORARILY SUSPENDED: United States Postal Service (USPS) Industry Alert

Mail Sent to Canada From USA Has Been Temporarily Suspended As Well

NOTICE: No Canadian letters have been processed by The Canada Post since November 17, 2024.

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WHY? There is an ongoing national strike by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, according to USPS.

THIS IS AN INTERNAL CANADIAN MAIL ISSUES

This issue impacts all Canadian mail, including domestic letters and cross-border letters.

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WHAT CAN YOU DO? LetterStream is here for you. If you do send mail to Canada LetterStream will hold onto it. We will send the mail we hold once the USPS is accepting Canadian mail once again.

LetterStream will not prohibit the sending of Canadian letters, but any letters received will be held until USPS resumes accepting mail for Canada.

At this time, we do not know when services will be restored.

LetterStream will keep our customers informed of updates through this channel and others as soon as USPS begins accepting mail to Canada again.

Exciting News! No Postage Hike In January 2025!

USPS won’t increase postage in new year

We’ve got some fantastic news that’ll make your morning coffee taste even sweeter—The United States Postal Service (USPS) is not raising postage prices in January 2025! Yes, you read that right. There will be no postage increase January 2025. For the first time in what feels like forever (since 2021 to be exact), the USPS is taking a breather from its usual New Year’s tradition of hiking rates.

Trust us when we say that we are just as thrilled here at LetterStream as you are! Not only does this mean more stability for your mailing budgets right off the bat in 2025, but it also gives you all a little extra time to enjoy the savings without the usual scramble to adjust.

A Brief Pause in the Usual Postage Rate Increases

The announcement comes following a recommendation that was set forth by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.

“Our strategies are working and projected inflation is declining,” said DeJoy. “Therefore, we will wait until at least July before proposing any increases for market-dominant services.”

On that note, let’s take a moment to appreciate this unusual break in tradition. January is often marked by the expectation of increased mailing costs, but this time, there’s no need to adjust your postage budget. You can continue sending your First-Class letters, statements and notices, invoices and legal notices with Certified Mail tracking without needing to spend more money. It’s a rare opportunity to enjoy some stability in your mailing expenses—a much-needed pause before the usual adjustments that will come later in the year.

Don’t Celebrate Too Early…

While we’re all for celebrating this January reprieve, we have to keep our feet on the ground. The USPS has signaled that the rate hike freeze is just temporary. Rumor has it, the next postage increase has already been planned with postage prices rising in July 2025, with additional increases lined up through 2027. Yep, that’s right—five potential rate hikes on the horizon. This is not fully confirmed but it is something to keep in mind when planning your budget since it’s likely to happen based on past years.

It seems the USPS is just delaying the inevitable, giving us all a little break before ramping things up again. So, while we’re excited about January, it’s important to stay vigilant and start planning ahead for those mid-year adjustments.

Staying Prepared with LetterStream

LetterStream is focused on being ready for whatever comes next, whether it’s an unexpected price increase or a temporary reprieve. While we appreciate the break this January, we’re also mindful of what may lie ahead in July and beyond when it comes to sending snail mail.

Our goal is to help you navigate these changes smoothly, ensuring your mailing processes remain consistent and efficient. Whether it’s planning your mailing strategy or adjusting your budget, we’re here to help you stay on track without disruption.

What’s Next?

So, what’s our advice? Enjoy this little postal victory, but don’t let your guard down. With July 2025 on the horizon, it’s never too early to start thinking about how to optimize your mailing operations and stay ahead of the curve. And, of course, we’ll be here to make sure your mailing game remains strong, no matter what the USPS throws our way.

Here’s to a fantastic start to 2025—and to staying prepared for whatever the rest of the year has in store. Cheers to no January postage hikes!

To learn more about LetterStream or to create a free account, click here.

Join LetterStream at the 2024 Community Association Law Seminar

As the legal industry and law firms continue to evolve, professionals are constantly seeking innovative solutions to enhance their efficiency and client communication.

With that being said, LetterStream, a leading provider of printing and mailing services, is thrilled to announce that we will be attending the 2024 Community Association Law Seminar, taking place on February 14-17 in Las Vegas to help bring awareness to lawyers and law firms about more efficient ways to send out their mailings.

Simplied Communication for Lawyers

In the legal world, effective communication is paramount. Attorneys often find themselves inundated with crucial letters and documents that need to be sent to clients promptly. That’s where we come in! LetterStream specializes in simplifying this process by offering a streamlined and efficient platform for the printing and mailing of important correspondence that is secure and confidential!

Why We Are Attending

Our reason for attending the 2024 Community Association Law Seminar is to showcase our services that empower lawyers to focus on their legal expertise while leaving the task of printing and mailing in capable hands. By leveraging LetterStream’s services, legal professionals can enhance their client engagement strategies, ensuring that important information reaches clients in a timely and professional manner.

The Community Association Law Seminar is the premier conference for attorneys and insurance professionals who represent those in homeowner’s associations (HOA community management), property management, condominium communities, or housing cooperatives.

And guess what? We do a ton of printing and mailing jobs for homeowner’s associations. In fact, we also provide print and mail fulfillment to many software providers that serve community associations, so it makes sense for us to connect with HOA lawyers.

Networking Opportunities with LetterStream Experts

The Community Association Law Seminar provides an excellent opportunity for legal professionals and attorneys for HOAs to connect with the experts at LetterStream. Attendees can engage in one-on-one discussions, seek solutions, and gain insights into how LetterStream’s services can be help meet their specific needs.

We can sit and discuss all of our mailing options including Certified Mailv (key for lawyers to have access to), Certified Mail with Electronic Return Receipt (USPS tracking and signature confirmation), USPS First-Class mailings, FedEx 2Day, Statements, postcards for marketing purposes and more. Or, you can just come hang out with us in our booth. We promise we’re fun to be around!

LetterStream’s Commitment to Legal Excellence

With a commitment to excellence and a proven track record of serving the legal community, LetterStream is dedicated to helping lawyers navigate the challenges of sending communications out easily and with minimal effort.

To learn more about the 2024 Community Association Law Seminar, click here.

New Printing and Mailing Updates

Wow, can you believe we’re officially in Q4 of 2023?! I’m sure you’re like us where each year you think, “Where has the time gone?” but this year feels like it’s going especially fast…wouldn’t you agree? With that being said, we’ve made a lot of new updates to our website, along with printing and mailing updates and processes over the last few months (well years even but that’s a blog post for another day) and we wanted to share some of them with you.

What LetterStream’s Been Up to With Printing and Mailing Services

Let’s get into it, shall we? Let’s fill you in on what the mailing experts have been up to over here at LetterStream over the last few months.

Our production team is always busy serving up fast, perfect mail. Our customer support team is rocking it by giving nothing short of mad customer love. Our IT department just keeps making magic happen. Our marketing department has been revamping and reorganizing our online presence and our accounting team just keeps being awesome at what they do best.

Now, let’s get into the specifics of what we’ve been up to behind the scenes for you, our awesome clients, new and old to LetterStream. Keep in mind, we try to keep our updates subtle, so they don’t disrupt your normal processes when creating jobs to send your letters.

Quick Updates to Help You Send Mail Online Include:

Re-named #9 envelope overprint
Added the correct artwork/thumbnail for our flat-sized envelope
Turned on user-created endorsements for our flat-size envelopes
Improved access to our BAA (Business Associates Agreement) for HIPAA clients. We now use DocuSign to get our BAA to you and back in record time.

More In-Depth Updates

Let’s get into a bit more detail for some of the bigger updates we’ve been working on and have finally launched.

New Chatbot on LetterStream

We added a new chatbot to our website. This one we are super excited for and it’s going to help with quick answers to just about any question you may have.

Our new Chatbot is not like the others. It is an extremely fast, highly intelligent AI that can actually get you help faster than if you were talking to a human. Now, of course, our customer support is still available to provide mad customer love to our clients, but the Chatbot will help to answer most questions instantly.

Read all about our new Chatbot here.

FedEx 2Day

We did it, finally! We turned on FedEx 2Day letters for users that have been active for 6 months or more.

Currently, we offer the standard FedEx 2Day letter option. This will get your FedEx envelope delivered by 5 P.M. on the second business day from when it was mailed.

To learn more about the new FedEx 2Day or to see the step-by-step process on how to mail your documents via FedEx through our online portal, click here.

Improved Help Articles

Our customer support team has not only been busy providing customers with the best support possible, but they’ve also been busy improving some Help articles to make it easier to find questions to answers you might be looking for.

We have a plethora of articles that have recently been updated but here are a few to reference below:

Welcome to the Team!

We are beyond excited to announce that we recently added a new member to our customer support team who has been such an incredible asset to us. If you happen to reach out to support and get a reply from her, be sure to say hi! Welcome to the team, Morgan!

Well, that’s the not-so-quick update we have for you in regard to what’s been going on here at LetterStream lately. Keep in mind that we’re currently in the holiday season, so be sure to prepare accordingly for closures coming up. Here is an overview of the 2023 USPS (United States Postal Service) and LetterStream’s Holiday Schedule.

LetterStream’s New Chatbot Help Box

Let’s face it, we all need a little help sometimes. Even the LetterStream team needs help getting fast and convenient answers to customers 24/7/365 to include all days of the year, including holidays where we’re closed. That’s where our new chatbot friend comes in. We’ve implemented a new online help chat tool designed to help us, help you, with finding the most up-to-date answers as well as tips and tricks to make your utilization of our website and mail-building tools even more powerful.

Ever-Present Chatbot Help Center

Floating in the lower right corner of every page of our website is a help icon. When clicked it summons a powerful chatbot tool, that through the use of AI, can quickly return answers to your most pressing questions. Make note that the floating button never goes away, however, it can be scrolled out of the way by using your side scroll button in the event that it covers something you are trying to read. To minimize the dialog window after getting your answer, simply hit the icon once more and all is hidden from view. Not to worry; your prior conversations are kept so you can refer back to them whenever you open the chat tool again.

Not Like Other Chatbots

Our chatbot is not like the others. No, other chats can get kind of annoying. You know what I mean? You ask a question and feel like you are waiting for a highly distracted person to get back to you. I often imagine one person with a circle of computers around them. Each one with a person in chat. The operator spins their rolling chair from one computer to the next answering 10 people at a time and never really understanding what anyone asks. Anyway, our chat tool isn’t like that. It is blazingly fast and provides extremely accurate information.

But, I Need a Human, Not a Chatbot

Not to worry. We have plenty of humans behind-the-scenes ready to give you even more personalized assistance. As some of you already know, our team of humans do super-human things and can answer any question you may have. They can even propose changes and fixes to our always-ready-to-help development staff. To reach a human, simply send an email to support@letterstream.com. But, while our humans don’t spin around in office chairs (well, sometimes they do for fun), keep in mind that they might be on break, in a meeting, on vacation or working on the next cool feature, so for the fastest answers, be sure to ask your questions in the chat tool first.

I Have an Urgent Need

Believe it or not, this is the main reason we introduced the chatbot in the first place. People sometimes run into snags and need a solution right now, not in 20 hours or after someone returns from a meeting. This makes our decision to employ a chatbot all the more relevant. It’s not just you that has an urgent need, many customers do, and we want to help them all.

Disaster Averted Thanks to Chatbot

Using the chatbot to find answers quickly takes the urgency and the drama out of your day. Another major thing that we do is provide you the tools, within your account portal, to stop, pause or cancel a job at any point up until it is time to mail. To take advantage of this process, simply log into your LetterStream account, find the job in question, and click the word EDIT appearing in the Options column. From here you can choose what you need to do, stop and shred, pause, delete, etc. Some options come and go as the job moves through our production process. For more information see our help article “Changing a Job.”

Help Pages Still Present

Which reminds me! We still have all our help pages, videos and content. Simply navigate to the bottom of any page and select HELP from the list of options in the footer. These resources are still very beneficial and is one more method you can use to get all the help you need.

COVID-19 Update May 2020

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Thanks to all of you for supporting and remaining loyal to us during COVID-19. It’s been a number of weeks since we’ve given you an update so we thought we’d pass along our current status.

As an essential business, as defined at both the states and federal level, we are still open and operating, and, aside from suspending our Express Letter job type, there has been practically no negative impacts on our speed of service or quality.

I have to express our overwhelming appreciation to our team for reacting positively to a great many restrictions that we imposed on them, like canceling their free gym memberships, closing down our breakroom, getting rid of shared food, and breaking up comfortable workgroups by spreading workers around the clock. We have been blown away by our team’s flexibility and commitment to us and to you our customers.

Going forward, as the country attempts to get back to some level of normalcy we are working on our next phase of operating, taking into account both state and federal guidelines and recommendations. The Governor of Arizona recently announced that we are in Phase One of his reopening strategy. Group gatherings are to be limited to 10 or fewer people and social distancing is still to be observed. Phase Two is likely to occur at the end of the month if all state metrics are trending in the right direction.

In Phase One we will continue to practice social distancing, equipment, and workplace disinfecting and frequent hand washings. Our breakroom and common areas will remain closed and essential employees are encouraged to wear masks. Non-essential employees will continue to work from home and meetings will be handled via conference calls, zoom meetings, and the like.

When the Governor declares Phase Two, we will cautiously work to remove some obstacles to productivity all the while continuing to embrace appropriate methods of cleaning and disinfecting. In Phase Two we anticipate reintroducing non-essential employees into the building in a limited capacity and may receive an occasional prospective client for a company tour.

Keep in mind we remain highly vigilant for the health and safety of our employees, customers, and those in our community and will always choose safety over convenience or profit. This period calls for fluid decision making that is the best interest of all. All that to say, our plans may change but know that we are striving to be the best possible us, so we can do our best for you. Thank you one and all!

2019 Baja 1000

Baja1000 (3)

Racing through Mexico!

Given today’s headlines it might sound treacherous to drive to Mexico; but how much more so, to make it a thousand-mile road trip through the country. And let’s add a twist of only traveling on unpaved and primitive roads.

Well, Dennis our Technical Services Manager is doing just that this weekend. But because Dennis loves a good challenge, he’s making the trip in a Volkswagen bug.

Dennis is racing in the 2019 Baja 1000, a grueling 1000 mile non-stop road race on nearly impassible roads in a car that’s over 50 years old and has a fraction of the horsepower of any modern car.

There are two things you should know about Dennis. First, he can fix anything (which LetterStream really benefits from and I’m sure his race team does too) and second he has a heart the size of the entire Baja Peninsula. Dennis has joined up with another Dennis, Hollenbeck, and his team to race Class 11 car 1121 through a brutalizing 1000 miles of dust and boulders. But car 1121 isn’t just a race car, it is owned and operated as an extension and fundraising arm of Real Life Ministries an organization that serves the less fortunate ones in Mexico.

So not only does Dennis get the joys of fixing even more things this weekend, he also gets the greater joy of participating in a journey to uplift the downtrodden and help shed light on a ministry seeking to do the same thing.

Dennis, we’ll be watching and cheering as you pound the rocky terrain of Baja Mexico and seek to make the world a little better for those around you.

Check out the following related websites:

Real Life Ministries. https://reallifeministries.org/ “committed to serving the less fortunate, tending to the sick, and providing shelter for the homeless. 365 days a year, 24 hours a day.”

Class 11 Car 1121. http://www.teamh12one.com/ “We are about Running the Race as it describes in Hebrews 12:one , “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us … run with perseverance the race marked out for us”.”

Baja 1000. http://score-international.com/ November 22 – 23rd 2019. View the livestream of the event at http://score-international.com/livestream-52nd-annual-score-baja-1000

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Update: November 25, 2019:

The Baja team fought a brutal battle, enduring one of the most difficult courses in the 52 years of the Baja 1000 history. And congrats to the team, for taking First Place in the group of Class 11 cars. How amazing, to punish the car and driver for over 36 hours of non-stop CARnage and still drive across the finish line. Great job team!

Baja4 Baja3

LetterStream Celebrates Sweet 16.

Fireworks Birthday Card (2)

A quick but heartfelt thank you to all our customers, employees (present and past), vendors and encouragers who have cheered us on in some way over the years.

We say a big Thank You! October 2019 is LetterStream’s sweet 16th birthday.

It has been fun to serve all those who enjoy our service these many years. And one fun fact… as nearly 25 new users discover and sign up for our services each day now (including LetterStream.com, OnlineCertifiedMail.com, and MailMyLetter.net), to send one letter or 10s of thousands, we signed up our 16,000th user this month too!

Thanks everyone!!

20% off Orange Paper and Postcards!

October Promotion

No tricks here, we are giving you a treat this Halloween season.
For the month of October, we will be offering 20% off all Orange 8 ½ X 11 paper and Orange Express Postcards.
You have a business to run and customers to keep happy, so we want to help you! For your festive holiday letters and notes look no further than LetterStream. For your fast mailing and printing needs, we’ll get the job done. Don’t wait until it’s too late and all the candy is gone, let us help you this Halloween season.

Las Vegas Debt Connection Symposium and Expo 2019

LetterStream

LetterStream takes on Vegas!

Come say Hi, and meet some of our LetterStream team. There are many ways that you can meet us, but in this case, all you have to do is stop by our booth. Were talking about the Las Vegas Debt Connection Symposium and Expo being hosted at the Red Rock Hotel, September 10^th-12^th, 2019. Our booth at this Expo will be stocked with our fantastic and passionate staff.

This Expo will be “focusing on networking and connection with clients, service providers, product suppliers, agencies, and attorneys- at a whole new level… This symposium and Expo’s concept is to have an opportunity to meet peers and other industry professionals, as well as finding new products and services that might make your job easier, better, more efficient, more productive, etc.” (DCSE)

LetterStream is going to have staff on hand to explain why outsourcing print and mail projects makes the most sense, as well as showing how mail managers can get their important mailings out the door in as little as two minutes. We’re sure there will be many questions about how Certified Mail can be sent and tracked online without ever going to the post office, and will be more than happy to answer every last one of them.

Please stop in and see us about your first-class mailing, statement mailing, payment coupon booklet printing, FedEx letters, annual meeting notice, postcards, certified mail, and any other mailing projects that you might need for a better solution.

Be sure to stop by booth #202, and say hello. We will be awaiting your arrival. See you soon!