ORLANDO 3/26/01 - The U.S. Postal Service announced today at the National Postal Forum that the desktop convenience and efficiency offered with the NetPost MailingOnline service is available to nonprofit organizations — at nonprofit rates. Qualified nonprofit organizations can now electronically transmit documents, correspondence, and newsletters along with mailing lists, to the Postal Service via www.usps.com. The electronic files are securely distributed to printing contractors located nearest to the delivery destination, where they are printed, inserted into correctly addressed envelopes with appropriate postage, sorted, and then transported to the post office for processing and delivery. "NetPost MailingOnline offers customers the convenience of having a post office, a professional printer and a mailing service just mouse-clicks away on their desktop personal computers," said Robert G. Krause, vice president, eCommerce. "We're offering the online solutions and the choices our customers want and need, and we're applying the applicable rate discounts whenever possible to keep our customer's costs as low as possible." Netpost Mailing Online, launched last September for First Class and Standard A Mail, maximizes cost savings for the consumer by commingling mailings, using a network of commercial printers, automation capability, pre-sorting the mailing and entering the mailing closest to its delivery point. The pricing for this service is geographically variable, regardless of class, and is based on options selected for the mailing in question. The options range from the class of mail to the number of pages in the document and from binding and envelope choices to the size of the paper used for printing. As an example, nonprofit organizations sending a two-page document that is printed on 8 1/2 x 11 paper, stapled, placed in an addressed, business-sized envelope with postage affixed at the non-profit rate of 13¢ (basic automation bar-coded rate) would pay approximately 29¢ each — equating to13¢ for postage and 16¢ for production and mark-up. The same document sent via First Class Mail would cost approximately 43.5¢ each.