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15 Years of Direct Mail Innovation: Our Journey at The Software Bureau

By |2025-12-03T08:45:41+00:00December 3rd, 2025|

Direct mail has proven to be one of marketing’s great survivors. As highlighted in Decision Marketing’s recent retrospective, the past 15 years have been a period of constant evolution for the UK direct mail industry. Rising costs, changing consumer expectations and the digital revolution have all played their part in reshaping the landscape. Through it all, The Software Bureau has been proud to stand at the forefront of innovation. Demystifying Complexity When we started, one of the biggest challenges for mailers was navigating the complex world of data sortation for postage discounts. Our mission was simple: make this process accessible and efficient. By developing intuitive software solutions, we helped businesses unlock savings without the headaches. Championing Data Quality As the [...]

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Revolutionising UK Mail Sortation with USE, the Engine Behind Cygnus & SwiftSort

By |2025-10-28T06:59:54+00:00November 3rd, 2025|

For over 25 years, The Software Bureau has been at the forefront of data processing and postal sortation in the UK. Our commitment to innovation and accuracy has helped over 100 clients, ranging from direct mail producers to charities and corporates, navigate the ever-evolving complexities of bulk mail sortation. At the heart of our sortation ecosystem lies USE, the Universal Sortation Engine, a powerful on-premise API that drives our flagship products, Cygnus and SwiftSort. What is USE? USE is our Postal Sortation API, designed to automate and integrate the sortation of UK mail in compliance with all major postal service operators, including: Royal Mail UK Mail Whistl Citipost The Delivery Group Whether you're sorting for Mailmark, Zonal, or Unsorted services, [...]

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The Software Bureau Unveils Two Major API Releases

By |2025-09-10T11:12:54+00:00September 10th, 2025|

We are pleased to announce two significant advances in our API suite, each a UK first in its own right. SwiftCore PAF v2 API – Cloud Based Address Enhancement We have released SwiftCore PAF v2 API, another ground-breaking milestone for The Software Bureau. SwiftCore PAF is the only UK batch address enhancement and verification platform hosted entirely in the cloud. It already processes over 100 million address records every month, and thanks to the limitless scalability of our Microsoft Azure backbone, its capacity is effectively infinite. This is address verification at industrial scale, delivered securely and reliably from the cloud. Learn more about SwiftCore PAF v2 API → Postal Sortation API (USE) – On Premise Sortation Simplified Alongside SwiftCore PAF [...]

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Objectif Lune Partner with The Software Bureau

By |2019-07-26T14:06:38+00:00July 26th, 2019|

Objectif Lune announce partnership with The Software Bureau to help organisations improve the speed and efficiency of their communications. The partnership sees Objectif Lune launch ‘TSB Mail Automation’ harnessing the power of the Swift Suite of data processing, data quality and postal sortation solutions from The Software Bureau. Objectif Lune will offer TSB Mail Automation software both standalone and integrated into their market leading product line of communication and mailing management software. “The Software Bureau is well known in the industry as postal automation experts and we are excited to be in partnership with them and add their technology to our portfolio, to extend our capabilities of offering customers true end to end automation.” Matt Irish, European partner manager Compliant [...]

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Partially Addressed Mail: The Secret Source of Responsive Acquisition Data

By |2019-01-15T09:58:03+00:00January 15th, 2019|

As we all know, last year GDPR made it illegal for marketers to contact cold prospects where legitimate consent could not be proven. Brands who previously relied upon sending mail to bought-in lists in order to acquire customers were forced to dramatically rethink their marketing strategy. Some reverted to untargeted, less responsive door drops, others redirected their marketing spend to other communication channels entirely for fear of prosecution by the ICO. However on October 5th 2018 Royal Mail sent a letter to customers titled Trial of a new advertising mail service: Royal Mail Partially Addressed Mail™. The letter introduces Partially Addressed Mail as a new way to identify and communicate with prospects. The product promises 165x greater targeting than door [...]

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6 New Automation Focused Products from The Software Bureau

By |2018-11-06T10:37:26+00:00August 28th, 2018|

The quest to achieve greater efficiencies, cost reductions and removal of compliance vulnerabilities has led data professionals to look for ways to automate their data systems. Modern mail producers, data bureaux and in-house data teams now see fast processing speeds and breadth of functionality as the standard and are turning their attention towards ways to reduce human interaction altogether and opportunities to achieve ‘lights out’ data processing and cleansing. The Software Bureau is adapting to meet these demands and today has unveiled a host of new automation focused products under the ‘Swift’ banner. These new software products make it easy for data teams to automatically process, sort and clean data without manual intervention.   Why Automate Data Processing and Cleansing? [...]

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MyMailing.co.uk – Now Supports Mailmark

By |2018-11-06T10:38:45+00:00April 17th, 2018|

The Software Bureau announced the upgrade of it’s free to use online sortation service MyMailing.co.uk. The improved service now allows printing companies, mailing houses and corporate mailing departments to achieve the largest postage discounts by sorting data to the Mailmark standard which now accounts for close to 2 billion mailed items per year. Mailmark sorts are priced on a pay as you go, nil commitment basis with all other Royal Mail sorts offered free of charge. MyMailing.co.uk helps organisations dramatically cut the cost of postage by sorting address data into Royal Mail compliant sequences and batches. Royal Mail incentivise users of direct mail with significant cost savings for complying with Royal Mail sortation requirements. To achieve these savings traditionally requires [...]

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3 Mailmark Updates

By |2018-11-06T10:39:04+00:00January 3rd, 2018|

It has been almost 4 years since the official launch of Mailmark, Royal Mail’s overhauled bulk mail service offering improved tracking and increasingly significant postage cost savings. The Software Bureau has been involved in Mailmark from its very inception, invited by Royal Mail to participate in pre-launch steering groups to help define its implementation, building Mailmark eManifest management software and writing the first of it’s kind guide to Mailmark implementation. Fast-forward to January 2018 and the Customer Bar Code (CBC) mailings, once the most popular mailing service, has now been phased out in favour of Mailmark. Close to 90% of all bulk mail sent in the UK is now Mailmark enabled. As the use of Mailmark has climbed so has [...]

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Free Online Mailsort Software Arrives 27/03/2017

By |2018-11-06T10:40:18+00:00March 21st, 2017|

Sorting mail to achieve postal discounts is a fundamental activity of every mailing house, print business or corporate print room needing to send bulk mail. It can however be a real rigmarole to get started with sortation. The need to invest in software and expertise for data preparation and artwork manipulation can itself quickly run into the tens of £000’s. This price tag and the complexity for organisations to get into direct mail can be prohibitive. That is why we are introducing MyMailing.co.uk. What is MyMailing? MyMailing.co.uk is a free to use online postal sortation service for all Royal Mail Retail bulk mail discount schemes with the exception of Mailmark (for now). The aim of MyMailing is simple. Make achieving [...]

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The Software Bureau Continues to Innovate to Revolutionise Bulk Mailing

By |2017-01-12T12:13:29+00:00July 25th, 2016|

Data quality and hygiene specialist, The Software Bureau continues to deliver on its pledge, outlined at the beginning of the year, to improve the direct mail industry by implementing a major upgrade to its Mailmark eManifest management app, GeMMA. The revamped product secures GeMMA’s reputation as the most sophisticated eManifest application available on the market. The new release marks a major landmark in the evolution of Mailmark products as it enables multi-user capability for the first time. This enables any part of the process to be worked on simultaneously by different teams. For example the data team can be creating the manifests at the same time as the account handling team refining the manifest details and uploading them to the [...]

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