It has been announced today that Royal Mail intend to increase stamp prices dramatically. The price of a first stamp will increase from 46p to 60p whilst a second class stamp will increase from 36p to 50p. The increases come as the regulator has allowed Royal Mail to set the prices of first class and business mail. The prices are set to go up from the 30th of April. PC2Paper will be increasing our postage prices in line with the Royal Mail increases once they come into force

That's according to this article which claims Royal Mail is looking to increase the price of 2nd class mail dramatically. If the rise goes ahead customer could find that the cost of a 2nd class stamp increases from 36p to 55p. Royal Mail have been criticised for the planned rise but have insisted that the increase was still affordable for vulnerable groups of people. The postal regulator Ofcom is now considering the request and will decide whether it will go ahead within the next few weeks.

PC2paper will be closed during the bank Holidays after the Christmas period. During this time any mail received will be queued in our system and processed on the next available working day. We are closed on Monday the 26th of December and Tuesday the 27th of December. All mail received after our 4pm cut off time on Friday 23rd of December will be processed on Wednesday the 28th of December.

New Years Delivery Dates

In addition to the above dates PC2Paper is also closed on Monday the 2nd of January for the bank Holiday. Any mail received after 4pm on Friday the 30th of December will be processed on the next available working day Tuesday the 3rd of December.

Today is the last recommended posting date for 1st class mail before Christmas. Any mail received by PC2paper after this date will still be processed as normal but may now be received after Christmas. We would like to remind customers that the overseas mailing dates for Christmas delivery have also now passed and that mail for these destinations will now be received in the New Year.

We are aware that some users are currently experiencing problems uploading PDF files. We are working to resolve this issue and hope to have it resolved later today.

The last guaranteed posting dates for UK mail are fast approaching. Customers should post any Second Class UK mail before close of business on Friday the 16th of December to ensure it leaves us before the last Royal Mail posting of Saturday the 17th of December. First Class mail should be posted by Tuesday the 20th of December in order to be delivered in time for Christmas. PC2Paper will continue to process all mail posted after these dates but Christmas delivery cannot be guaranteed.

We have now added the Recorded Delivery and Special Delivery options back on the website. It was necessary for us to remove these temporarily due to a problem with our online postage provider Royal Mail which meant we could not process these options. This has now been resolved.

Our US printing station will be closed on Thursday the 24th and Friday the 25th of November for the Thanksgiving holiday. During this time we will continue to pass all US mail to our printing station for posting, however, customers should be aware that no mail will actually leave the printing station on these days. Normal service will be resumed on Monday the 28th of November.

It has been necessary to temporarily remove the Recorded and Special Delivery options from our website. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause, this is due to a problem with our external postage provider. We will reinstate these services as soon as it is possible to do so.

For almost a year now PC2Paper have had an iPhone and iPad friendly version of our site. We haven't talked about it much except in our chat forum where we were trying to get people to test out the beta version of this site. The users that have tested it have also discovered that the site works quite well with other mobile devices such as Android and the mobile version of the Opera browser.

The site is limited to a small subsection of functionality and this is primarily writing letters and viewing saved, waiting to be sent and sent letters. We did this primarily as we didn't know how the micro site would be perceived and planned on adding more functionality gradually as it gained in popularity.

Why haven't you developed an iPhone/iPad app yet?

We have been asked this on several occasions, we have had several companies offer to develop us one and we have also had a version of an app sitting on one of our development machines. Developing an iPhone/iPad friendly website is a lot easier than developing an app. A website is also a lot easier to support than an app that sits on the iPhone or iPad. We also know there is a definite benefit to having an iPhone and iPad app, one of these would be the ability to write your letters offline and then sync the iPhone or iPad back with your PC2Paper account when your device was back online. In order to do this we would need to cache a lot of data on the device itself such postage costs, letters and account details and make sure this is all synchronised with your account when you are back online. To do this we would also have to build the infrastructure on our website to support this kind of functionality. When you look at it this way you can see all the bits that would have to make up our application.

In short we wouldn't want to release an app just for the sake of releasing one that gave a pretty poor experience and a very small section of functionality that just didn't provide any more benefit than what a web friendly version of our site for your phone would do.

Going forward

We would welcome any feedback on the mobile version of our site. This should help us to add more functionality which is of benefit to you when constantly on the move.