Royal Mail’s Online Postage used be a great service. In a nutshell, it allowed you to pay for posting something online. Once you had paid, you could then print out an envelope or label and pop it in the post without having to get a book of stamps or visit the Post Office. No mess, no fuss.
For Mac users, that was the happy situation up until fairly recently, when Royal Mail “upgraded” their offering and completely broke it.
You see, when you download your label, it comes as a PDF with “SAMPLE†in large, unfriendly letters across the front of it and a small box explaining that this wouldn’t print out on the final label. Which was true, whether you were using Adobe’s official PDF viewer, Adobe Reader or Apple’s Preview, which ships with Mac OS X and doesn’t come with a load of crapware attached (Adobe Air? Acrobat.com? Fuck off Adobe). However since Royal Mail “upgraded” the service, if you print the label in Preview it also prints the unfriendly “SAMPLE” and the notice that it won’t print the word “SAMPLE”.
So you have to use Adobe Reader instead. However this doesn’t work either, as I found out. Not only does it force you to install other services that I didn’t want (Still here Adobe? FUCK OFF), but when I first launched it, it halted to install updates. That’s right, updates on software I just downloaded and installed. Then, say for example you told Royal Mail you wanted to print out a DL envelope. Well Adobe Reader can’t manage to print that out for you. Instead, it assumes that the envelope itself is A4 and scales it down to fit on the envelope. Which it then fails to print on, only managing to fit the top 25% of the label on the bottom of the envelope, rendering it useless.
So congratulations Royal Mail. You’ve taken a useful, if little known, service and rendered it useless for me. I guess I should be thankful you haven’t closed the Post Office at the end of my street.
Hate adobe too – I have acrobat installed and it prompts for updates about twice a week!
I’ve always found the online postage a bit of a faff – usually I’ve wanted to use it to print a load of stamp labels because I’ve got lots to send out but it doesn’t like you doing that, you need to type in the address for each one.
At my last company we used Royal Mail’s SmartStamp system which installed on the desktop. When it worked it wasn’t too bad – you could print a page full of stamps on cheap labels or do a mail merge direct onto envelopes. But the software was flaky at best and you have to pay a monthly fee for the privilege of paying more to print stamps!
Couldn’t agree more with this – a very simple and time-saving service made completely redundant. Luckily it seems now that Preview works again, but there are a whole host of other issues – the most pressing being that it tells me my return address (even when I change it to a ONE LINE) is TOO LONG, then when I remove it, it tells me I can’t NOT include one. Ridiculous.
I appreciate the initiative to improve it, but so far it’s just one big headache with no real advantages over the old system!
Hi,
The “new improved” online postage SUCKS! I can not believe that they released this to the public. Regarding Acrobat, try PDF-XChange viewer instead. It’s free and lightweight.
If the new online postage does not work, why don’t they just bring the old version back?
This is soo true. I wrote to them to ask for access to the previous website, (some sites let you do that) after it printed out one label across all four labels on the page, but all I got was a reply telling me not to use the service. This is their actual reply:
****************
We are aware of a technical issue when using Online Postage, however the
development team are working on the fault.
Please try using Online Postage later as the fault will be fixed as soon as
possible.
I apologise for the inconvenience this is causing you.
***************
Hilarious
Couldn’t agree more with previous comments – there’s really no excuse for the new interface to still be this buggy when it’s been out for weeks. Here’s some of my current issues:
1) If I use a “favourite mailing” then it will NEVER auto-complete for me, I have to enter the address manually. I’ve given up trying to use favourites because of this, so as far as I’m concerned this part of the software effort was all a waste of time
2) Sometimes when I want to create a second mailing, the service gets changed – typically, it comes up as 39p instead of 61p – and it won’t let me edit the service to correct it, it steadfastly sets it back to 39p and I have to log right out to convince it that I want a large stamp.
3) I also had the same issue as a previous commenter re. return address length. Even after I convinced that to work, it frequently used to forget my return address from one session to the next, but that seems to be OK at the moment…touch the wood of the chief developer’s head…
Even on the few occasions it DOES work right it takes me far longer than it used to, with all those extra pages and button presses. WHY can’t it just remember the service and print format I used at the end of the last session?
I’ve also asked Royal Mail to PLEASE revert to the old, perfectly good interface – or at least offer it as a “classic” option – no response yet.
I strongly suspect that this is just a sneaky way of providing such a poor service that they entice customers off the free service and onto the paid SmartStamp service…
Hi, I can no longer find the option to top-up my online prepay account and after reading some of the comments on this site I can only assume RM don’t want me to top-up my prepay account because it free and their expecting me to update to the paid account and pay them a monthly fee, what you get for paying this fee is nothing, next thing you know they will be charging people just to enter a post office to buy stamps.
The last time I used a post office I had to queue for 20 minute just to send a small parcel. What I am doing now is weighing any parcels and buying my stamps from the local newsagent and trying to package parcels, so they fit into the post box.