Today’s Postal Bulletin is here. The mid-year “major” release from the USPS (2nd of two this year) is barely two weeks away, so I didn’t anticipate much change of consequence, and there were no surprises here.
There are two DMM revisions in today’s PB:
- New Ancillary Service Endorsement Options
- Collect on Delivery (COD) Service Features
Both are effective July 28, 2013, coinciding with the USPS “major” update.
The 2nd item on COD service features won’t affect Presort, but the changes “provide new standards for the automatic holding period for Collect on Delivery (COD) articles, expand the acceptable payment methods for COD articles, and provide current options for the redirection of COD articles.” If you use COD services, you’ll want to pay special attention to the change in holding period – instead of a 30-day maximum, they’re cutting it down to 10. If you use COD service you will (obviously) want to read about the other changes.
The other item introduces new ancillary service endorsement options. “The new options will provide a separate correction notice via ACS™ (Address Change Service) to the mailer as well as the return of undeliverable mailpieces. In all cases in the revised standards, the new option is shown as option 2.” The STIDs (service type IDs) for these options are supported in Presort with brief descriptions provided, so they should be available for use in your Presort jobs but you will need to know which STID applies to your situation.
There’s also a note contained in this item about allowing additional First-Class and Priority Mail® with alternative addressing formats to print the endorsement “Change Service Requested” (known as “option 1,” the counterpart to the new “option 2” mentioned above).
The other content, at least as far as Presort is concerned, appears to be the “normal” Postal Bulletin content – a few International Mail Manual updates, some minor PO updates, etc. One other article that caught my eye (perhaps because of the unexpectedness when looking for "mailing" information) was about Information Security detailing a scam where cyber criminals offer to email a photo of a car advertised online and the photo file contains malicious software.
