Readers who haven’t ordered personalized stamps featuring photos of their loved ones, prized possessions or former vice president Spiro Agnew yet are out of luck. Stamps.com, a privately held firm, voluntarily ended PhotoStamps, a joint offering with the U.S. Postal Service. The program allowed customers to upload personal photographs onto live postage stamps.
What got the program pulled was the discovery that controversial images, such as Monica Lewinsky’s little blue dress; former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, who is facing a war crimes trial; executed spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; and Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski’s high school yearbook picture made it through Stamps.com’s screening process.
Before ending the program, Stamps.com initially ruled that images of teenagers and adults were verboten. It did allow images of babies, children, plants and animals, landscapes, vehicles, and business or charity logos.
Dumb, dumb, dumb. Obviously pornographic or scatological images were a no-go, which is fine. But limiting any human image cut out a lot of very important prospective markets.
The prices for PhotoStamps started at $16.99 for a single sheet of 20 first class (37-cent) stamps, or 85 cents per stamp. In the best-case scenario
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