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Articles weighing more than 13 ounces must be presented at a post office (not at a contract station or branch but at a place manned by governmment employees. That's the weight of the Unabomber's mail bombs.

The main post office in Lawton, Oklahoma, has a separate collection box out in front, in addition to the "local" and "not local" boxes, for mail to Wichita Falls, Texas, because the cities are so closely associated economically and socially. That mail goes directly to Wichita Falls. Otherwise it would follow the path through the processing center in Oklahoma City, fly or be trucked to the processing center north of Dallas, and finally go from there to Wichita Falls, taking two days. The direct dispatch saves a day over automation.

Wes Leatherock snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com snipped-for-privacy@aol.com

At the opposite extreme is mail handling in my town of Pahrump, NV,

60 miles from Las Vegas. Mail from Pahrump to Pahrump goes to Las Vegas for canceling and sorting, and back to Pahrump for distribution. We get next day delivery for such mail. Apparently, it's cheaper not to do cancellation in Pahrump. We used to have two mail slots in the post office: Pahrump and not-Pahrump; now there is only one.

Dick

Hm?

Domestic Mail Manual

126.1.2 Pieces Weighing More than 13 Ounces

Priority Mail weighing more than 13 ounces bearing only postage stamps as postage may not be deposited into a collection box, Postal Service lobby drop, Automated Postal Center (APC) drop, Postal Service dock, customer mailbox, or other unattended location. These mailpieces are also precluded from pickup service. The sender must present such items to an employee at a retail service counter in a Postal Service facility. Improperly presented items will be returned to the sender for proper entry and acceptance.

There is similar language for Express Mail at 116.1.1, for Parcel Post at

156.1.6, for Media Mail (ex-Book Rate) at 176.1.2, and for Library Mail at 186.1.2.

Now, Parcel Post, Media Mail, and Library Mail are typically sent via surface, but they can receive air transport on a space available basis.

There are no restrictions for depositing mail at contract post offices, stations, or branches as long as the parcel is presented to the contractor over the counter.

In domestic mail, there are no restrictions on depositing metered mail at unattended locations. A friend used to obtain $0.00 meter strips from the office with a postage meter next door so he could deposit stamped flats and parcels without restriction.

Also, you used to be able to hand stamped items over the weight limit to your friendly letter carrier but even that's been eliminated.

Good idea. I wonder if that's common at a lot of post offices on the edge of territory served by a major plant.

However, I'm shocked that that post office still has local and out-of-town boxes. I've heard of post offices that refuse to order parts for the cancelling machine and stop maintaining them, so desperate to cut down on clerks' hours that they won't let them run the machines. The only way to get a local cancel any more is to insist on a window clerk using the round dating stamp. For all I know, these may have been removed as well.

As the deficit grows ever larger, the post office removes more and more service that one used to rely upon.

That happens in a lot of places any more. Sorting out the mail manually at the originating post office is very time consuming.

Some of the mail from Pahrump is going to other places. The first time-consuming task in sorting the local mail manually to separate the outgoing pieces. Is the collection box ouside the post office the only place to mail letters in Pahrump? If not, there is probably a lot of mail coming in from other sources, for example mail collected by city letter carriers from patrons or coming in from rural routes that is not segregated by local/non-local. (Does Pahrump have city delivery? I lived in a town that did not and you had to go to the post office to pick up your mail.)

But mechanical sorting is so much less labor-intensive and so much faster that you can go a considerable distance to get that advantage and still get next day delivery.

After all, telecommunications traffic--even local calls from landlines--is done that way.

Wes Leatherock snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com snipped-for-privacy@aol.com

Will they still even look at the POSTNET I can & do put on my envelopes; or should I just stop doing so?

Our post office once had separate "local (within zip code)" and "out of town" boxes but these have been removed. They told me all mail, even stuff within the zip code, is sent to the major post office for processing in the city 35 miles away.

We are also at the state border. It would make sense to have a box for the other state's mail per above but they don't. Mail going inter- state usually takes an extra day even if the air-line distance is short.

A single-piece letter with preprinted barcode and postage paid with stamps or metered requires a FIM A pattern (facing identification mark). FIM pattern is placed adjacent to and to the left of the postage. The scanner in the facer-canceller machine looking for tags on postage stamps and flourescent ink in meter marks will spot it, causing diversion of the letter from the encoding step. The scanner in the facer-canceller machine doesn't check the address block at all, where you have undoubtably printed the POSTNET. With no FIM pattern, the letter will not skip the encoding step and another POSTNET barcode will be sprayed on in the lower right hand corner. The lower right-hand corner is the superior position to the the address block.

FIM must be printed to the edge of the envelope, possibly bleeding over the fold, or within a distance shorter than most home printers require for the margin. The usual kludge is to lie to the printer about the envelope's true dimensions, but that may not be good for the printer.

The FIM specification is found at DMM 708.9

Note that the nine-digit barcode in the FIM pattern is a palindrome.

The main post office lobby used to have 2 mail slots for outgoing mail, Pahrump only and elsewhere. Mail put into the Pahrump-only box got postmarked Pahrump. The other mail got postmarked Las Vegas. Now they have only one slot for outgoing mail. Now there is only one slot.* I suspect that they decided that it was cheaper to send all the mail to Las Vegas for sorting.

*Actually, the second slot is still there, but is labeled "Misdirected mail. Not for your box."

Yup.

Depending on the time of day and year, and the load, toll calls from New York to Florida might be routed through Denver.

I heard about a situation in Boston. They need another switch in the downtown Franklin Street office, but had no physical space. So they used a short-haul microwave link to access the hardware in the suburbs. Mr. Moderator, you worked at Franklin Street office; did you ever hear about this?

Dick

***** Moderator's Note *****

I don't think so: Franklin Street did have some "R" carrier microwave, but only the microwave was there: it went over to an L-carrier terminal at Bowdoin Square on coaxial cable.

Franklin Street had the WADS office when I was there, which served TWX for a time after Western Union took it over, but no other Class 5 offices that I know of. Come to think of it, the "743" exchange, which was the N.E.T. centrex, was also served out of Bowdoin Square, so maybe that's the "suburban" office you're thinking of.

I supposed there might be/may have been an ORM at "Boston Two" after I left, but Verizon always runs those on fiber. IIRC, the microwave antennas on the top of the building have been idle for years: there may be some links still in service between Hyannis and Martha's Vineyard, but I'll defer to those still working on them for that info.

Bill Horne Moderator

[ ''' ]

There was a considerable article in the Bell Labs Record when somebody first figured out how to do this. The Wisconsin National Guard went to summer camp in Washington state, and when they started calling home in the evening it jammed all the direct trunks, then used the final route through the Sacramento machine and as a result tied up traffic all up and down the West Coast. Somebody figured out to punch new translation cards and put them in at 7 p.m. local time to make White Plains first choice from Washington state to Milwaukee, figuring Washington state-White Plains and White Plains-Milwaukee trunks would not be busy by that time (10 p.m. in the East). It worked like a charm and even White Plains-Norway (Ill.) final trunks had capacity for the overlow.

Of course, such reroutes for special occasions, or just hourly variations, became routine before long.

Wes Leatherock snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com snipped-for-privacy@aol.com

Probably a farily simple check like that used for UPC symbols. You just sum up the digits, do a modulo with the next tens unit and that's your check digit.

Our post office, just inside California at the Arizona border, has had a separate box for the neighboring states for many years. There were for a long time three places to deposit mail inside the post office:

• local ZIP code only

• neighboring states of Arizona and Nevada

• all other destinations

Far from removing boxes, they recently added a fourth:

• Netflix discs only

I haven't seen dedicated spots to deposit Netflix discs in the customer areas of any other post offices, although I have spotted them in the employee areas of some.

Lee

Pretty funny. When Netflix was relatively new, people would get annoyed by return envelopes addressed to distribution centers located across the country. I'm sure the idea was just to balance inventory across the multiple centers, but people saw it as an evil plot to throttle the system as Netflix doesn't send the next disc out until they receive one.

My experience was that the post office ignored the address on the envelope and just dropped them all of at the local center - thus no sorting required. I haven't seen a Netflix envelope with an address other than the local one for years now.

The San Bernardino Regional Center in Redlands has a Netflix box, I think the reason is the Netflix is also in Redlands. I have gotten movies the same day a couple of times.

As I anticipated, the post office has delayed sunsetting POSTNET barcodes yet again. On January 13, it was announced that mail with POSTNET barcodes will still be eligible for automation discounts indefinitely.