Stamps.Com By Mary Sheridan, President, Tampa PC Users Group mcpease@mindspring.com

I began using e-stamp a couple of years ago. I loved that I no longer had to go to the post office. Over the years I’ve had some really unpleasant experiences at the post office and avoiding going there really appealed to me.

I had lots of trouble with e-stamp. I couldn’t get a lot of the address book features to work. I would save addresses and never find them again. I would type in an address and when I tried to print it, it wasn’t there and nothing was printed. I lost quite a bit of postage and, more importantly, the time it took to try to get the program to work.

Last fall e-stamp announced that they were no longer going to be in the consumer postage business. I didn’t want to go back to using regular stamps, so I found stamps.com. I didn’t like the fact that I would be charged $4.49 no matter how much postage I used. The e-stamp program had only charged 10 % when I bought postage, and it didn’t matter how long it took to use the postage. But, they weren’t around anymore, and besides, I’d had all that trouble.

I’m sold on stamps.com now. Everything works beautifully. The address book stores the addresses just as it should with no problems. The postage prints perfectly every time. I’m saving 30 minutes a month from the time that it used to take to pay my bills. I guess I really should go to a bill paying service online, but I still have "trust issues" about that kind of thing.

The stamps.com was easy to set up. Everything is done online, so I didn’t have to buy any software. Every time I print postage I remember the trouble I had with e-stamp and it really makes it worth the approximately $5.00 a month that I pay. I’ve heard that the stamps.com company may be in trouble, but I hope not. I’ve found something that helps me a lot and I hope it’s around for a while. u