Today's PB has two DMM revisions. The one on "Shipper Paid Forwarding - Treatment of Mail" does not appear to affect our software, and is mostly a set of corrections for references in an article from two weeks ago.
The other item, "Optional Preparation for FSS Zones When Combining Mailings of Standard Mail and Periodicals Flats," signals that the USPS must be ready to accept FSS preparation of mixed class comail, which only became an officially supported preparation with the rate case implementation on Jan 22 after having been a pilot program for a number of years.
Our software supporting the pilot was enhanced to support an option to do FSS preparation for FSS sort plan and FSS facility sort pallets. We retained that option in the current release, and we warned in documentation that the FSS preparation was not yet officially supported but likely would be sometime this year. With this PB, it appears that time has arrived! Of course we will need to scrutinize the official language in some greater detail, but on first read it appears the rules are consistent with what we expected. This includes the human-readable content text, for example.
If you are already doing mixed-class comail preparation, I'll point out that the article’s intro text gives reminders about details (or should I say quirks?) of this preparation, specifically that the preparation is in line with STD mail, the mail gets STD service, no DADC discount is available, etc. I consider it a chance for a quick refresher, a good thing if you’re more familiar with the pilot program which was mostly aligned with PER mail instead of STD.
If you’re not doing this prep but it seems interesting to you, after you review the official language in this article and in the DMM to see if you’re really interested you’ll want to call your sales rep to find out more.
The other items in the Bulletin look pretty usual – minor PO updates, stamp announcements, that sort of thing, along with the cover story about March 4-10 being National Consumer Protection Week.
