Personalized Stamp Program to Start Again

Stamps.com Inc. isn’t licked yet.

The online postage seller said Tuesday that it would resume a program allowing customers to turn personal photos or designs into valid stamps, sending its share price up more than 18%.

The popular PhotoStamps service will resume May 16, with strict rules about what can and cannot grace a piece of postage.

The U.S. Postal Service last fall asked Stamps.com to suspend PhotoStamps after the Los Angeles company sold 2.75 million stamps in less than two months. Although most customers were content to immortalize wedding photos and baby pictures, pranksters couldn’t resist the opportunity to print up provocative alternatives.

The website thesmokinggun.com, for instance, posted stamps bearing executed spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, vanished labor boss Jimmy Hoffa and Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, who used the mail service to deliver homemade explosives to his victims.

This time, images will be examined by human screeners, said Stamps.com Chief Executive Ken McBride. The company has hired specialists in world culture and history to spot inappropriate images.

The most-popular choices for the pilot program were benign: Babies and children accounted for one-third of the pictures; families, couples and individuals made up another third; and pets filled about one-sixth of the stamps. The rest were mainly landscapes, cars, business logos and artistic images.

Stamp denominations range from 23 cents to $3.85. A sheet of 20 custom 37-cent stamps costs $16.99 -- a markup of nearly 130%. Customers upload images to the company’s website and receive stamps in the mail.

The Postal Service said it would review the PhotoStamps program again in a year. Stamps.com shares rose $3.08 on Tuesday to $19.74 on Nasdaq.