Certified Mail | LetterStream Blog

How Do You Organize Certified Mail Return Receipts?

certified mail green card

These slippery little green cards have a way of getting lost. For you mailroom folks, you probably know them as a PS Form 3811, but the rest of us simply call them green cards. Obviously “Certified Mail Return Receipt” is a more complete term, but it is probably not the term we use when trying to find the one we lost.

So the big question is, how do you keep track of green cards? They are small and get mixed in with empty envelopes that you put in the trash, they fall out of file folders even while in a filing cabinet, they get piled up waiting for a rainy day for someone else to file. Let’s face it, they are hard to file and they are hard to find. There’s nothing like the attorney calling and saying, “We are headed to court, what happened to the green card?”

Here’s a better way to organize your PS Form 3811 receipts… skip the entire paper process altogether and keep your electronic signatures organized online–always available, always filed correctly, always filed instantly, and best of all, never lost.

Wondering how?

The best way to get your certified mail receipt electronically filed is to create your certified mail online. When you use LetterStream or OnlineCertifiedMail.com to create your certified letter, your PS Form 3811 as well as all of the related USPS tracking scans will be available online for you to access when you need then.

The online process of making real Certified Mail is fast and easy, with no forms to fill out, no envelopes to seal, and no trips to the post office. We take care of all that so you can focus on other pressing issues. Oh, and one more benefit… you won’t need to type in that 20-digit certified mail tracking number–you can look up information about your certified letter by searching on the job name or the recipient’s name.

Stop searching for green cards. Use our online tools and let us organize them for you.

LetterStream Joins ACA International – Visit Us At The Expo This Week!

ACAinternationalLogo

LetterStream‘s ability to send First-Class and Certified Mail with ease, one-at-a-time and in bulk, is attracting the attention of credit departments and collection agencies.

ACA International, the Association of Credit and Collection Professionals, is a not-for-profit trade association for professional businesses and individuals in the credit and collection industry.

By establishing an affiliate membership with ACA, LetterStream will have a greater presence in the collection and credit market and can highlight their unique solutions in the field.

Sending Certified Mail during a collection process can be a time consuming process. However, with LetterStream’s easy-to-use website, Certified Mail can often be created and mailed the same day. In addition, online tracking and signature reporting tools provide easy access to the important documents that prove the mailing followed proper collection practices.

For industry collection software and service bureaus that send large quantities of mail from various departments, LetterStream’s API allows automatic transmitting of letter data directly to LetterStream for printing and mailing. This process makes all the work involved in printing and mailing completely disappear.

Visit LetterStream at the ACA International Spring Forum and Expo in Scottsdale, Arizona this week.

2013 Spring Forum & Expo
March 20-22, 2013
Talking Stick Resort – Scottsdale, Ariz.

How Can You Send Mail on Postal Holidays?

USPS Post Office Sign

LetterStream can send your mail even when the post office is closed for a holiday. This might be hard to believe, but it is true! The United States Postal Service (USPS) will accept our mail at the post office on some postal holidays even though the front doors are locked.

The holidays that the USPS accepts and processes our mail include Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (MLK Day), President’s Day, Juneteenth, Veteran’s Day and Columbus Day.

Our mailing process is a bit different than putting a letter in your personal mailbox or dropping letters in the big blue USPS mailboxes. In fact, we even skip the front counter of the local post office and go directly to the USPS Bulk Mail Entry Unit (BMEU).

BMEU’s process large quantities of mail each day and are basically the main drop point of large mailers across the country. In order to accommodate the large mailing volume, BMEU’s maintain a slightly different holiday schedule than the retail operations of the postal service. This allows larger mailers to keep their mail traveling through the postal system when most other organizations cannot.

So feel free to use LetterStream.com to create first-class mail, postcards, standard-mail and non-profit mail, even on holidays.

The only catch is that on holidays when we take mail to the post office, we are only able to mail Certified Letters if we have more than 200 of them (that is nearly always the case, but it is something to keep in mind anyway).

We recommend creating your certified letters anytime you have them–most holidays we do have enough to meet the postal minimum.

Now where did I put that green card?

If you send Certified Mail, you know what sort of pain it is when the attorney asks for the green card (PS Form 3811) and it can’t be found.

green card - certified mail receipt

I know, I know….we all like to put our highest paid employees on the task of filing the green cards so they are always where they need to be. Well, ok…..that’s not exactly true. In reality, they stack up on the receptionist’s desk, then they get moved to the mail room, then they may make it back to the collections department, with each department attempting to file a few whenever they get an idle moment.

Sound familiar?

Wish there was a better way?

Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t need to worry about hanging on to those pesky green cards? Instead, what if the green cards were electronically delivered to us with the name and address of the recipient and the signature of the person who received the certified letter. Then, what if the signature was instantly and accurately filed, just the way we like.

While we are dreaming, let’s make it one better. What if, when the green card is needed — even if it’s years down the road — all we need to do is type in the name or the address of the person who was sent the letter and we’d immediately see the certified letter, the tracking information and the signature, all available to be printed and handed over to the person who needs it. Now that would be ideal!

And it would also be an explanation of how our Certified Mail process works.

Don’t file green cards, use LetterStream.

Sending Mail on Postal Holidays

Can you send mail on USPS postal holidays? Sure you can!

Let’s face it, we don’t all get the same paid holidays that the United States Postal Service (USPS) employees get. In 2012, the USPS is closed for 10 holidays.

However, if you are working and you need your mail to go out, LetterStream has the ability to mail your letters on many postal holidays. While the post office front counters are closed and mail carriers are off, there are some holidays that the post office back office is still on duty.

So, “Yes”, the USPS accepts and processes our mail on President’s Day (Washington’s birthday), Columbus Day, Veterans’ Day, MLK Day and Juneteenth.

If you are like us and are working those days, feel free to send your mail to us and we’ll get it mailed on the Holiday for you!

Certified Mail by the Thousands!

Certified Mail Job

We were contacted the other day to help one of our customers with a fairly large Certified Mail job.

It wasn’t our largest USPS Certified Mail project, but with more than 23,000 certified letters, it was still a lot of certified letters (see actual picture).

In addition to printing, folding and inserting the certified mail for our client, we also licensed a cobranded version of our website so their clients could log in and check the status and retrieve signatures of any piece of mail.

The job went out quickly and easily and provided everyone involved complete USPS tracking information as well as electronic signatures, matched with the mail piece.

Big or small, whether you’ve got a single certified letter or thousands, our automated processes will make it easy.

Cancelling Gym Memberships Via Certified Mail

Don’t you hate it when gyms keep charging your credit card even after you cancel your membership?

One good way to get the charges to stop is to send a cancellation letter via USPS Certified Mail.

Google “gym cancelation letters” and you’ll find numerous articles relating to how to stop gyms from charging your credit card on a monthly basis, and they almost all have one thing in common… they state that your letter should be sent via Certifed Mail.

We’ve mailed scores of cancellation letters via LetterStream.com, as well as our partner site, OnlineCertifiedMail.com. Once you create your letter, send it Certified Mail online without a costly trip to the post office.

Who’s Faster? You or Us?

Sometimes we hear concern from mailing prospects on the east coast. Their concern is that it will take too long for mail created here in Scottsdale (Phoenix area), Arizona to make it back to the east coast.

This is a reasonable and logical concern, but we are pretty certain that our west coast mail can consistently make it back to the east coast and be delivered faster than east coast mail can.

Doesn’t make sense? Well, consider these points… When the post office is closed on the east coast, we generally have 2-3 extra hours, given the difference in time zones. We have tremendous print and mail capabilities, which means we can probably get the mail printed and inserted far faster than an in-house solution, improving our chances of getting the mail finished first.

Your jobs are not filler work for us, so we won’t put the job off to work on other projects (which we hear happens in some companies where printing and mailing isn’t their bread and butter), further improving our chances of getting the mail out at least one day faster than other companies.

And finally, the best part… our mail departs our facility after the local post office is closed, travels to a USPS acceptance facility, gets sorted to commercial airlines headed for the east coast and typically hits major east coast cities before the sun even comes up. So, when someone is concerned about the speed of mail across the country, we simply say “West is Best!”.

A Unique Scanning Solution for Sending Certified Mail

Fax

We must admit, we like creating unique solutions for our customers.

A recent solution involved a client who was working with physical documents that needed to be re-mailed to individuals. Their documents were stamped with recording dates and were coming back from the county recorder’s office. These officially recorded documents needed to be mailed via Certified Mail to their clients and the task represented more work than they wanted to take on.

Our unique solution? We allowed them to create a cover sheet with the recipients’ address on it and then scan the document to us via their copier/scanner. Our software automatically received the document, read the address on the cover page and created the mailing. It worked well!

HIPAA Certified

HIPAA

HIPAA Certified. You might know what this is if you are in the medical and/or insurance field. It stands for The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It is a collection of rules that help govern the privacy of patient data and information.

Even if HIPAA doesn’t affect your organization directly, it does in a round-about way if you use LetterStream… mainly because we train our staff on HIPAA rules and follow them internally within our organization. The policies and procedures that we’ve put in place to protect private health information actually protect all our clients’ jobs.

So if you’re a law firm that sends class action lawsuit material or a pool cleaner who sends monthly statements, your information is guarded by the same tools and resources that we use for hospitals, medical offices and third-party administrators.

At the time of this blog post, 100% of our full-time employees and a portion of our part-time employees have passed HIPAA certification!