Automated postal kiosk and certified mail

[Adam H. Kerman]

If there's anyone still left on Usenet, do you know what's going on with
the use of certified mail at an automated postal kiosk?

As recently as April 18, I sent a tax return buying postage with
certified mail at a kiosk and it worked. This evening, I had to send a
form to IRS and the kiosk said it was restricted from sending certified
mail after hours. It scanned but refused to accept the certified mail
form sitting on the counter, and it wouldn't let me buy the proper
amount of postage to let me pay the certified mail fee.

To use certified mail, I'm not required to obtain an acceptance scan at
a retail window so why can't I pay the fee at a kiosk?

[danny burstein]

All I'll say is they've done more and more to
make the kiosks _UNfriendly_ over the years.

As one example: you can no longer purchase
stamp strips in a value you prefer.


--
_____________________________________________________
Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key
dan...@panix.com
[to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]

[Adam H. Kerman]

danny burstein <dan...@panix.com> wrote:
>Adam H. Kerman <a...@chinet.com> writes:

>>If there's anyone still left on Usenet, do you know what's going on with
>>the use of certified mail at an automated postal kiosk?

>>As recently as April 18, I sent a tax return buying postage with
>>certified mail at a kiosk and it worked. This evening, I had to send a
>>form to IRS and the kiosk said it was restricted from sending certified
>>mail after hours. It scanned but refused to accept the certified mail
>>form sitting on the counter, and it wouldn't let me buy the proper
>>amount of postage to let me pay the certified mail fee.

>>To use certified mail, I'm not required to obtain an acceptance scan at
>>a retail window so why can't I pay the fee at a kiosk?

I made a complaint about this. I was told it was a programming error
that would be fixed at next update. I haven't tried it subsequently.

>All I'll say is they've done more and more to
>make the kiosks _UNfriendly_ over the years.

>As one example: you can no longer purchase
>stamp strips in a value you prefer.

That was one of my specific complaints. I had looked up the total of
postage plus fee, so I knew how much I needed to buy.

I told them the kiosk should simply work like a postage meter.

I also tried to buy postage for a package but was prevented from doing
that as well as the feature was grayed out. You can tell it to subtract
value from stamps already on the package, so I was hoping to get a strip
for the correct value. I should have just used stamps.