Google Envelopes | Use G-Mail To Send Real Letters With A Click

I am one of those people that loves to receive real letters from friends and acquaintances. Whenever one of those little letters is dropped into my mailbox my whole day is rejuvenated and I get all sticky inside. But unfortunately, that doesn’t happen that often as pretty much all the friends I have are on the Internet with Facebook accounts, Twitter accounts and you name it. They pretty much got it all figured out. With today’s technology, it’s way faster to just fire up that app or site that you pretty much spend your whole day on and send a quick email, DM or message. It’s like snapping your fingers and it’s done, but it’s truly boring! (Not that I want any of you to stop sending me those wonderful DMs, do whatever you feel works for you.) The real mail or “snail mail,” as it is correctly called nowadays, is diminishing more and more each day. If nothing happens to change this, we’ll see envelopes in museums one day showcasing the odd behavior of long gone humans.

That’s exactly what Rahul Mahtani & Yofred Moik are trying to stop. These two bright minds have come up with a highly brilliant idea of incorporating snail mail into G-Mail. The solution, which is in beta testing right now, is to add another button to G-Mail which enables you to send your message through snail mail instead. What’s ultimately cool about it is that it will be using Google Maps to plot out the route on the envelope to tell the full story of how the snail mail got to your personal letterbox just outside your door.

I certainly wouldn’t mind getting boatloads of those snail mail envelopes to my letterbox, and I can’t wait for this to really start working. I think Google is doing something über cool by rolling back time yet utilizing the new technology that is present today. Google gets a “Hip Hip Hurray” from me for letting designers like Rahul Mahtani and Yofred Moik blind them with their genius and brilliant masterpiece of a solution for keeping the snail mail in our lives.