Now here is a cool application for the iPhone that blends the greatness that is the Internet with sending postcards. In other words, never again must you purchase a postcard with a generic image on it, find a foreign post office, buy postage, and then wait 6-8 weeks for it to arrive back home. Nope. HazelMail Postcards takes postcards online and global!

HazelMail Postcards by ThinkAmerica LLC.

Before I get into the app, I just want to mention the price. FREE. When I heard about this app, I immediately thought $9.99 but once I read into it and tried it myself, I was very pleased. For a free application, HazelMail Postcards makes some very real looking postcards and is quite useful.

So, how do you send Internet postcards? It’s actually quite simple and I will demonstrate below:

1. Take a picture that you want to use for your postcard
2. Type in a message and the destination address (or use one from your contacts)
3. Send.

Three steps is all it takes to get your postcard from anywhere in the world to back home. Once your postcard is sent, it is received by a global network of printers that is closest to your recipient. The printers are based in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia, which are all utilized by HazelMail. Your postcard is then printed and mailed to your recipient. There are no extra charges for this and the typical turnaround time is 1 week.

So just consider this for a moment.

You create a custom postcard, it’s sent online to a global network of printers nearest to your recipient, the postcard is printed and mailed for you to your recipient and is received within a week. In the end, your recipient gets a real, tangible postcard and all you paid was $1.00 USD. Amazing.

HazelMail Postcards work on credits or “HazelBucks”; 1 “HazelBuck” equals 1 postcard. So to send postcards from the app, you must have a balance of atleast 1 “HazelBuck”. 1 “HazelBuck” equals $1.50 US Dollars, so still in most cases its cheaper than an actual postcard after you consider postage.

You can buy “HazelBucks” directly from the HazelMail website to store onto your HazelMail account. The options are 12 “HazelBucks” for $12 USD, 24 “HazelBucks” for $24 USD, or you can buy individual “HazelBucks” for $1.50 USD. In either case, the “HazelBucks” are valid for 1 year.

As an introductory bonus, when you download HazelMail postcards, your first postcard is free!

You can check out HazelMail Postcards in the iTunes App Store for free and check out the HazelMail site for creating an account.

Enjoy!