[notaddicted]

Somebody has to say it:

In the year 2009 snail mail is grossly inadequate.

1. Does it prove anything? No. Sign something with a private key, that is proof.

2. Is it better for record keeping? No. Fires, floods, and rot are all enemies. Storing it digital allows one to replicate a lifetime of mail in 10 seconds.

3. Aesthetic? Only if you have a strong packrat or nesting instinct.

4. Cheaper? No. Not by a fucking longshot, not even close.

Take a one dollar bill out of your wallet, burn it, and send an email.

[Osmose]

1. Public/private key authentication is, as of 2009, still not something the mainstream internet user can figure out to do easily. I'd guess most don't even know it exists.

2. I can also delete a lifetime of mail in 10 seconds. The steps required to redundantly store or back up data require either knowledge the layman doesn't have or expensive software (assuming they don't know of the free alternatives).

3. Letters are like books in that there will always be people who prefer the personal feel of paper and ink to a computer screen.

4. Agreed.

You seem to be assuming that his market is YC users or other techies. As stated in other comments, this has great applications for the elderly, non-techies, and people in other countries wanting to send mail to the US.

[philwelch]

Snail mail does take more effort, though. Which directly leads to the following things:

1. Politicians receiving mail from their constituents will take a snail mail more seriously than email.

2. Love letters seem more meaningful when received via snail mail.

It also leads indirectly to the fact that there's no spam filter for snail mail to get stuck in. Not because there's no spam in snail mail, but because the amount of spam is reasonable. 95% of email is spam, which is manageable for the user because of spam filters, but false positives in spam filters make snail mail actually a bit more reliable for the average recipient.

[zaidf]

Funny but as snail mail is used super decreasingly over the past decade, its personal value has drastically gone up.

I have an aunt who snail mails a few photos of her family every now and then with a handwritten letter. She's been doing this for years. Yet, each year receiving the personal snail mail brings more excitement than the previous year!

[megaduck]

And yet despite all of those factors, I'll be using Snail.

I have elderly family that greatly prefers getting physical letters to email. I also do a lot of foreign travel, where it's inconvenient and expensive to send letters.

Snail is a definitely niche product, and only useful in weird edge cases. However, you might be surprised how many people encounter those edge cases on a daily basis.

[senko]

An interesting extension to the snail mail services would be to snap/upload a photo, use geolocation to find the user's current location and automatically send postcards "from" anywhere in the world.

I always send my postcards the last day and then hunt for the stamps and post box/office where I can send them from. I'd really find this service useful :) Although, arguably a big part of receiving a postcard is the stamp which you wouldn't have here.

[chriskelley]

I do a lot of foreign travel as well - but that is the only time I ever send snail mail! People love getting email from other countries. I always send letters and postcards to not only family/friends, but all of my best clients as well. In fact, one of my clients has all of the postcards I send them up on their office refrigerator. Talk about good for business - every time they go to get out the creamer, they are reminded of me. And though it's a little more expensive than domestic mail, an extra couple of bucks is worth the thanks I get in return.

Making people feel special is worth a couple of bucks.

[jrockway]

I also do a lot of foreign travel, where it's inconvenient and expensive to send letters.

Hence the suggestion that you use email.

[jamesbritt]

Casual discussions with doctors tells me that some number of them do not trust E-mail, see assorted problems with it (security, authenticity), and prefer to get and send physical documents.

You can argue over whether theses concerns are legit or solved problems, but at least people are unconvinced, or are otherwise reluctant to switch to digital.

[arnorhs]

It's good for grandparents though

[RiderOfGiraffes]

The vast majority of people I know don't know about digital signatures. Most of the remainder can't use them, and are uncertain of how to verify them. The result is that they don't trust them. They all, however, understand and trust a piece of paper with a statement and signature.

Dustin's service doesn't solve that, but your comments are, quite simply, ahead of the game, and detached from current reality. That reality, as is always the way with reality, changing, but that change takes time.

EDIT: First paragraph re-written.

[symptic]

You are right, but keep in mind some organizations and processes still "trust" a time-stamped hard copy more than an email. We're fortunate enough to be very tech savvy, but this service, to me, is meant to be an accommodation to those who refuse to join us or are stuck in the past, or those who think it's a fun thing to try.

[goodkarma]

Your points are all true but printed snail mail is still more mainstream then PGP encrypted e-mail.

Despite its age and the fact that it is grossly inadequate, snail mail still has a place in our society - at least for now.

[tomjen2]

As long as you are only sending charectors on the paper, you might be right, but you can send physical items in a letter - unlike in an email.

And the set of people I want to send mail to intersected with the set of people who have the faintest idea what public/private keys are is the empty set. So that won't fly.

In addition, the fact that I am willing to pay a dollar to send a message is a statement that you might want to take five seconds to look at the letter, whereas most emails aren't worth taking a look at.