Well here I am, commenting exactly one week after the publication of this PB. Be that as it may, let's get to it! The DMM revisions are:
- Clarification on Processing Refund Requests for Unused Meter Indicia
- New Standards for Round-Trip Mailings of Optical Discs
- Bundle Preparation — Strapping Transparency
- New Authorization Process for Mailers Using Special Postage Payment Systems
- Forwarding and Return Service for Parcel Select Mailpieces
Certainly some of these items will affect particular mailers, but from the standpoint of our Presort product there does not seem to be any impact. Note that the change in standards for round-trip mailings of optical discs clarifies that mailings as described in the standards will not be subject to the First-Class Mail non-machinable surcharge; in particular, new 333.2.7 includes "The disc itself is not considered to be rigid for purposes of the flexibility test in 301.1.3." Good to know if you happen to be doing that type of mailing.
Also, as noted in my last entry in May, this would normally seem to be a PB issue that would include Label List changes, but those changes will not be published in the PB until the next issue on 6/16 even though the changes went into effect on Monday, June 6. Those changes are surely being shown right now in the online version of the Label Lists, so if there are issues with mail preparation not matching those online Label Lists it's possible it's because the prep was done using a list that is valid until August but is no longer reflected in the online list. We do have the list of changes, so remember you can check with us if you have any issues like this.
Two more things I'll mention that I just discovered or recalled while checking out the Label List issues.
First, if you subscribe to the DMM Advisory email you probably saw an item announcing how the Label Lists are now available directly from the Postal Explorer main page - no need to navigate through to the DMM to get them anymore, just go to pe.usps.com and they're listed in the lower right of the page. I see when you click through to them, they are formatted a little differently, so they don't inherit the same look as the online DMM pages.
And second, what you may not know is that you can't get to them anymore from the DMM page, so the "Index and Appendices" item no longer includes "Label Lists" as an item. This is itself interesting for a couple reasons: now that the Label Lists are not formatted the same as the rest of the DMM, there is no date shown beside the tables to show the last date the tables changed! For example, you can't tell when looking at any online table if they changed on June 6 or not. And the other problem, which we can hope is just a temporary foul-up, is that every link from the DMM to Label Lists that I checked is currently broken; for example, clicking on a link to the L007 table from 707.12.3.1a leads to a "page not found" page.
That's more than enough for now. Next week we should see the Label List changes published in the PB which will make them easier to reference, so be vigilant till then.
