Snail Mail - Easy printing of envelopes

Dec 18, '06 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: robg

The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 9 out of 10]

[This is the Pick of the Week for the week of December 18th]

It's that time of year again -- the dreaded holiday card season. That means lots of envelopes to be addressed, cards to filled out and stuffed, stamps to be applied, and then a trip to the post office to send off the pile of cards. Of all the tasks involved in this process, it's the addressing of the envelopes I dread the most. Hand-addressing is the most personal, printing labels the easiest, and printing directly on the envelopes is ideal, but more difficult. For the last couple of years, we've just used printed labels, but I wanted to try printing on the envelopes this year.

I started with the obvious candidate, Address Book, but quickly gave up once I found you can't set a different font size for the return address and the destinaton address. I think I then tried nearly every solution listed on MacUpdate and VersionTracker under a search for envelope in the process of discovering Snail Mail.

I found Snail Mail perfect for the job for a couple of key reasons. First, its interface was easy to understand, and neither too feature-laden nor too stripped to be useful. Second, control over the placement of the return and destination addresses was good, though still not as simple as a visual drag and drop operation. Third, it was easy to take an address from Address Book, and then modify it for the print job only -- this makes it easy to add a spouse or partner, for instance, who might have a card of their own in your Address Book. Fourth, you can use either your card from the Address Book as the return address, or a manual entry -- and you control which fields from Address Book show up on the envelope. Finally, I had full control over the font and color for both address blocks. Printing bar codes is also an option, though I chose not to use that feature.

After a short bit of work, we had a full set of printed envelopes, thanks in no small part to Snail Mail. It's a simple program, but it does its job very well.

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