Since I had to send a letter to our solicitor as part of the ongoing paperwork for our impending move, I thought I’d give the newly available Post Office Online Postage service a go.

The actual process is relatively straightforward, the website steps you through selecting the postage you need, entering the address, and then paying for the postage. It is a fairly strange (and probably expensive in bank charges for the Royal Mail) concept to pay for a single 32p ‘stamp’ by a credit card, but it is possible to set up a pre-pay account too. However once you’ve paid, the site produces a PDF of your address label ready to be printed. In theory the only complication is if you’ve requested special or recorded delivery, or a certificate of posting, all services that still require your package to be taken to a post office.

Or at least that is the theory. The problem I came across is getting the printer to print out an envelope properly. Granted I haven’t ever tried printing envelopes before, but it was still a pain. Most of the problems actually came back to how I had Adobe Acrobat reader configured. Since the printer is by default set up to print to A4 pages, Adobe helpfully tried to scale the label up to A4 size for me, so when it printed out on the DL sized envelope it didn’t come out quite as it should. The Apple PDF viewer behaves slightly differently, but still doesn’t quite work without some tweaking. In general the key thing to do was to change the main settings to use DL sized media, and ensure you configure the orientation properly. However once you’ve got that sorted, it’s just a question of printing out, and popping it in a post box. Having said that, for this first attempt it would probably have been quicker to hand write the address and stick on a stamp – hopefully next time will be a bit better as I won’t have so much trial and error.