Spring '21 Q&A: Certified Mail from Home

This week, we’re diving into listener questions! I’m very excited! These questions span all areas of adult life, and I had to do a little digging on a few, especially this first one.

Listener (and my sister in law) Shannon Vogel asked me a very tricky question: Can we send certified mail from home?

Just so you know, mailing stuff really freaks me out, because I feel like I’m always doing something wrong. So, I’m going to start by defining certified mail for you. When you send something via Certified mail, you are essentially creating proof that the item was sent. So you get a receipt that says that you actually sent the item, and you can also request notification that the person receiving it actually did. You know on TV when someone has to sign for a letter? That’s this. Certified mail creates a record so you can’t screw someone over by saying that they never sent it to you. They have proof they did, with certified mail. I also met an author who sent copies of her manuscript to herself via certified mail before sending the transcript out to publishers as a way of protecting her work. If the publisher turned around and used her work without payment or permissions, she had legal proof, in that timestamped package, that she was, in fact, the author. 

So Shannon is working from home and wants to send certified mail for work from her home. So, I did what literally nobody wants to do, and called the United States Postal Service Customer Service Line, and the absolutely lovely customer service representative, Are, walked me through our options.


So you can send certified mail from home, BUT you have go through an approved PC postage provider, like Stamps.com. The big con to this is that you have to pay a monthly subscription fee to use this service. So, if you’re working from home and have to send a lot of certified mail, and you can comp it through work, this service is definitely worth it. But if you’re just looking to do a one-time mailing, it’s least expensive and most convenient to use the kiosk label printers in the Post Office lobby.  You can send certified mail through other carriers as well, like FedEx and UPS, but from what I could find, you still need to go in to their stores to provide proof that you actually mailed it. 

Shannon, I hope this helps, and I appreciate the question! Tomorrow we’ll hear a question about how to proceed if you might need legal intervention at work. If YOU have a question, you can send it to me on Instagram @nowthatimnotyourteacher or email it to me at nowthatimnotyourteacher@gmail.com.

See you back here tomorrow!