Okay! I finished my exams and all that!
Feels awesome to be back! Oh god, it feels like I’ve been away forever! tsk tsk..
So I did some blog-worthy materials on the side during some free time I had, and found this new print company called BlueMailCentral.
They specialise in sending your documents from the comforts of your penthouse bedroom, stuffy office cubicle, the public toilet to places all over our planet. Even North Korea is on their list at USD 1.05, which include VAT, stamps, envelopes and 1 sheet of paper.
What you have to do is to just upload your document to their print servers and they’ll do the job to send your documents to practically any of the still-expanding-list of nearly 370 countries.
This translates to saving mundane time licking those stamps and manually posting your documents at the post-box!
Once you installed their desktop software, you can automatically upload those documents by selecting BlueMailCentral as your printer, when you click print on let’s say Acrobat Reader or Microsoft Word. After which, you can enter the address to which you would like it mailed to, or if you have written it in your document – the software would automatically pull it out for you. You are also able to select to print your documents in colour or greyscale; simplex or duplex. No sweat at all.
So I proceeded to send it to myself to try the system out by sending a university report spanning 17 pages, complete with coloured text and images. You can also test the system out as your first mail is free upon registration! May I also add that there’s no page count restrictions for this free mail? =) Ah! Life’s fickle. BlueMailCentral have recently changed it to 7 pages maximum for your first free mail, to prevent people from abusing the system, lol yes I was one of the lucky ones!
At first, my mailing got delayed due to reasons being the Singapore-side printer company not managing to get my electronic document from the BlueMailCentral server. This quickly got rectified by BlueMailCentral’s International Logistics Manager, Mr. Michel van Boven, who was extremely helpful during the entire process. The best thing being that personal touch when he sends out a personal email asking users to provide feedback on their new baby.
Once my problem got rectified and the Singapore-side print company got the document, I got it swiftly the following day.
Apologies over the relatively grainy photo quality as I could not find my Canon and had to use my iPhone’s lousy camera to take them.
The envelopes come in standard sizes and pages would be folded by half to be slotted in these envelopes. They are exploring other sizes but these would have to be the standard for now.
Apologies over the address removal editing skills – it’s official – I suck at photo edits.
What was interesting but slightly inconvenient, was the use of 3 envelopes to store my 17 page report. Reason being that the automatic envelope inserter can insert up to 7 pages without damaging the envelope.
The maximum an inserter machine can handle, without ripping apart the envelope, is in most cases 7 sheets of paper per envelope. To be sure that the document isn’t damaged we had to limit the amount of sheets per envelope. We did print on the envelopes 1/3, 2/3 and 3/3…this is done so people can check if the entire document did arrive.
Print laser quality is very acceptable and is comparable to my Hwelett Packard CM1017 laser printer’s output. I realised though the blues in my document appeared somewhat with an added purple tint, but I think I’m just nitpicking a whole lot here. They print mainly on either the Xerox Igen3 or the HP Indigo print systems.
Pages weigh in at around 80g/m² giving it a nice overall weight to your documents.
There was a perculiar addition of the lines to the left side of your pages, but all is done in good faith to reduce chances of your documents from being read by the print operator.
The marks on the left side is called OMR, this stands for optical mark recognition. The OMR is needed to automate the inserting process for the envelopes. A machine reads the sequence and checks for missing pages at the same time, then he inserts the letters into the envelopes. If people do this by hand the contents of the letters could be read by them, we want to avoid this of course!
All our partners had to sign a document that forbids them to copy any contents or leak any information that could be in the documents. Our systems are fully automated and the files that are to be printed will be uploaded to their server. They will automatically redirect the file to their printer and after printing put it in their enveloping machine. This way the file is not even watched by them, only the process is monitored. Of course they are able to open the file if they want to, but they can not use any of the materials. If they do so, they will be held accountable for it!
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