Letterjoy vs Historic Mail: A Comparison
Prospective customers sometimes ask our support team how we compare to Historicmail.com. On this page, we lay out the highlights of the Letterjoy difference.
What sets Letterjoy apart?
Ownership & Experience
Letterjoy was founded in 2017 in Illinois by entrepreneur Michael Sitver while studying for his undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago. We remain proudly American-owned and operated and we still mail many of our letters from our Washington, D.C headquarters.
Historic Mail was launched in late 2020 and is owned by a China-based ecommerce conglomerate, Galton Voysey, best known for their Dealdash “penny auction” site (Google it. It’s pretty scammy).
Curation & Research
Letterjoy’s Washington, D.C. office is located within a half hour’s walk of the National Archives, the Smithsonian, and the manuscript reading room of the Library of Congress, where our researchers spend hours and hours poring through offline records to find you amazing letters.
Meanwhile, Historic Mail doesn’t have a US-based research team and their curation choices are haphazard, pulled exclusively from what’s available online (as far as we can tell), and often just plain boring.
Design & Readability
Every Letterjoy letter is carefully designed to recreate the experience of receiving the original letter, while maintaining readability. To do this, we work with an outstanding professional design team to restore faded letterhead, signatures, and other design details and carefully lay out each letter for print.
Historic Mail appears to just download faded images of their letters from the internet and print them alongside a transcript.
Writing
When you order Letterjoy, you get more than just weekly letters. You also get detailed and interesting articles about each letter. Our “postscript” articles are researched and written by a team of experts with degrees from some of the nation’s finest universities, including the University of Chicago, the University of Texas at Austin, and Georgetown University.
Meanwhile, Historic Mail’s letters include only brief commentary of uncertain origins (Once again, they’re based in China)
Paper & Postage
At Letterjoy, we believe that every element of your experience deserves careful attention. Letterjoy letters arrive at your door on a variety of fine stationeries and parchment-style papers of varying hues and textures, tailored to your letter and, for the most part, milled in the United States.
And we don’t just stop at the paper in tailoring your experience. Each of our letters is mailed to you in a sturdy cream or ivory-colored envelope, made in Wisconsin, and sent to your door with a real First-Class stamp.
Meanwhile, to our knowledge, Historic Mail sends their letters on generic white copier paper, in a white plastic-windowed envelope with metered (printed-on) postage.
Customer Service
Letterjoy’s customer service team is 100% US-based, with customer satisfaction scores above 90%. Historic Mail’s isn’t.