LetterAgent
Mail physical letters by just asking your AI assistant.
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If you swap the sender and recipient addresses, the sorting machine reads the center of the envelope as the destination, so your letter will likely travel back to you or stall in a dead-mail loop. Nothing about the letter is ruined, and the postage is still good. The cleanest fix is a fresh envelope with the recipient in the center and your return address in the top-left corner.
| Envelope zone | What goes there | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Center / lower center | Recipient's full address | Sorting machines read this block as the destination |
| Top-left corner | Your return address | Used only if the letter can't be delivered |
| Top-right corner | Stamp or postage | Cancelling machines expect it there |
Automated mail processing looks for the address block in the lower center of the envelope. That is the destination, full stop. The return address is expected in the upper-left corner and is only read if the letter cannot be delivered. The machines are trained on this layout and they do not pause to consider whether you might have meant the addresses the other way around. Handwriting does not change this: the optical readers find the center block, parse it, and route the letter. Everything downstream, from the barcode sprayed on the envelope to the truck it gets loaded onto, follows that one reading.
Most likely, it comes back to you. The machine reads the center address, which is your address written where the recipient's should be, and routes the letter to you as if you were the recipient. You get your own letter back in a few days, confused. If the center address is unclear or incomplete, the letter can stall instead: it may get pulled for a manual look, or it may end up in dead mail. Either way, it does not reach the intended person, and it can take weeks for the mistake to surface. Time-sensitive letters are the real casualty here: the letter is not lost, but the deadline is.
If you catch it before mailing, do not try to be clever. Arrows, cross-outs, "this side up," and "no, the other address" notes do not help: the machines ignore them, and a human may never look at the envelope. A fresh envelope is the only reliable fix. The good news is that nothing is wasted. An unused stamp can be peeled or steamed off and reused, and metered postage that was never mailed can be reprinted in most cases. Rewrite the envelope correctly: recipient in the center, your return address top-left, postage top-right.
They take handwriting out of the equation entirely. LetterAgent prints letters into double-window envelopes, so the recipient's address shows through one window and the sender's address through the other. There is no envelope to address by hand, nothing to swap, and nothing for a sorting machine to misread. You describe the letter to your AI assistant, approve the exact quoted price, and the addressing is handled as part of printing.
Ready to mail it? Send your letter with LetterAgent: describe it to your AI assistant, approve the exact quoted price, and it is printed and mailed.
LetterAgent is a working name. Prices include print, postage, and our service fee. US prices in USD, Canadian prices in CAD (Canadian prices exclude applicable sales tax, added at checkout). Currently in private testing.
Need help? Ask your assistant: it can check a job's status any time. If it ever can't handle something: hello@getletteragent.com