April 3, 2009

Intelligent Mail^® Services Weekly Update

PostalOne! and FAST Outages. We are preparing PostalOne! release 20 to support the price change on May 11 and the test environment for the Intelligent Mail Full-Service option on May 18. We are making extensive upgrades to support the significant increase in electronic mailing information anticipated with Full Service. Two system-wide outages for PostalOne! and FAST are planned at this time: April 12, from  2 a.m. to 12 p.m. CDT; and from 10 p.m. CDT on April 25 to 10 p.m. CDT on April 26. During the outage mailers cannot access PostalOne! or submit electronic mailing documentation. Mailers — including Electronic Verification System (eVS) mailers — should review their file submission process es and make arrangements for these two scheduled outages.

The outages do not affect the FAST online scheduling capability, but mailers will not be able to schedule appointments electronically using Mail.XML.  During the outages, mailers who wish to schedule appointments online must log directly into FAST through https://fast.usps.com.  Mailers scheduling electronically for the April 12th outage should schedule appointments no later than 12:00 a.m. CDT on April 12.  Mailers scheduling electronically for April 25 to April 26 should schedule appointments no later than 8:00 p.m. CDT on April 25. Mailers who need to schedule appointments with less notice must use the online application during the outages. We will make every attempt to accommodate unscheduled arrivals, but we cannot guarantee that all will be accommodated.  We will not apply ratings to appointments during the outage periods.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and we appreciate your support. Please call the PostalOne! help desk at 1-800-522-9085 or your local FAST facility coordinator if you have questions. We will advise you of additional scheduled outages in support of the May PostalOne! release 20.

New Business Customer Gateway. In the May PostalOne! release 20 we are redesigning the interface mailers use to access PostalOne! and the Facility Access Shipment Tracking (FAST) system. If you use PostalOne! or FAST, please remember to logon between March 30 and April 14, so we can capture your profile information and migrate it to the new Business Customer Gateway. If you use both PostalOne! and FAST, logon to PostalOne! and we can capture your profile for both systems. Testing for PostalOne! release 20 is underway. Initial testing of the Business Customer Gateway uncovered some usability and access issues that we are fixing. We will explain how to access the new Gateway in an updated version of the Full-Service Option User Access and Reports Guide which will be posted on RIBBS by April 17.

Postal Wizard. For Full-Service mailings using the Postal Wizard, only the owner of the mailing permit will receive start-the-clock information. We will consider additional recipients in a future release, if the mail owner and mail preparer are different. For Full-Service mailings, both the owner and the preparer can receive start-the-clock information using Mail.dat as described in the Guide to Intelligent Mail for Letters and Flats.

Mail.XML Technical Specification. IDEAlliance published two updated versions (6.0-C and 6.0-D) of the Mail.XML technical specification in support the Full-Service option. We updated PostalOne! Mail.XML Technical Specification  on RIBBS to support these changes. We listed specific changes in the “Change History” section of the Specification.