Tighter standards for addresses prompt new look at mailing practices

The new standards are designed to bring greater efficiency and lower costs to the mailstream. One of the biggest sources of waste in the current system is mail that lacks a valid address and cannot be delivered. The Postal Service estimates it spends nearly $2 billion each year to handle this mail, and mailers waste billions of dollars more creating mail pieces that ultimately cannot reach their intended recipient. The Postal Service has committed to cutting undeliverable mail by 50 pct by the year 2010.

The root cause is address lists that are not updated to reflect the tens of millions of changes that occur every year as families move, new households are created, new buildings open, old buildings close or are repurposed, and streets are built or renamed. In tests conducted by Pitney Bowes, up to 12 pct of the letters in a typical mailing may have substandard addresses.

Effective August 1, the Postal Service will no longer provide automation discounts for mail that lacks what the USPS calls a “valid delivery point,” tacking up to six additional cents on to the postage for each such piece. For a mail drop of 100,000 pieces where 6 pct lack valid delivery points, this could result in more than USD 230 in higher postage costs for the mailer. Multiplied across the billions of letters that enter the mailstream every year, the potential financial hit reaches tens of millions of dollars.