Modern Technology

• Stuffing envelopes by hand is now a thing of the past. Mailing houses have machinery that folds, inserts, seals and franks - all in one process at a rate of 5,000 per hour!
• High speed label applicators can put labels onto envelopes at a rate of 12,000 per hour.
• For those items which are not machine compatible mailing houses have full time staff, sometimes on 24 hour shifts to complete the work by hand.

• Use your imagination! If technology can automate many tasks, and does them far faster than a person, then the cost for a machine to do the job will be far lower.
• Mailing houses usually do not need to advertise. The job is mostly automated. It is mostly office or factory based. After all, that is where the machinery is.
• Most of the envelope stuffing jobs advertised are scams. One version of the envelope scam is:
  
  • Advert in a shop window says you get paid for every envelope stuffed, you reply, you pay your registration fee for the magic answer which turns out to be a copy of the same advert which you then pay to advertise in another shop. It is just a con to get your registration fee.
• Try our Scams page for more about scams and links to websites explaining how they work.

• Still interested? Check your local business telephone directory under Mailing Houses or Direct Mail. Don't forget, these are not usually jobs you can do at home!

An ex-envelope stuffer says: "Stuffing envelopes eh? Well my experience of that was probably not typical. It started out as a casual job in a manky factory. We weren't allowed to do it at home and it was very high-class so everything had to have the appearance of having been done in one of their offices and sent to a select few!! In fact our database for just one client alone had over 220,000 names on it. We put first class stamps on everything. Basically, it made you go cross-eyed checking the labels didn't have silly typos on them. It made your arms & back ache, lifting the mail sacks nearly crippled you and by the end of the day your hands were covered in paper cuts that made you look like a plaster packet had exploded on to your fingers. I did that for about 6 months on a casual basis and then ended up doing 45 hour weeks working as the bosses' right-hand man. Then we moved to posh new offices and I didn't do much stuffing after that."

But what about envelope addressing?

• Sorry, same thing! Why would a reputable company want you to address envelopes when the names are already on a mailing list and they can even print them out in special fonts to make it look like hand writing.