July 2, 2009

Intelligent Mail^® Services Weekly Update

Periodicals Service Type ID:  We have identified a significant number of Intelligent Mail^® barcodes of some national periodicals that bear the service type IDs (STID), 782 or 783.  Use of either of these implies a specific request for Address Service Requested handling, which means the mailer is requesting the return of each undeliverable piece to them with postage due at the single piece price. Additional requirements include the required Ancillary Service Endorsement and the printing of the return address on the address. Some mailers currently using 782 or 783 appear to not be aware of the service they are requesting, and are not printing the return address on the mailpiece. Such mailers have subsequently requested exceptions once these mailpieces are in the mail stream, causing a significant amount of costly and unnecessary work in the UAA processing units. If you or your clients are not requesting return of all undeliverable periodicals postage due, your STID options do not include 782, 783, 144, or 145. Appendix A of A Guide to Intelligent Mail for Letters and Flats provides guidelines on the appropriate service type codes to use.

Mail.dat^® 8-1: We will discontinue support for Mail.dat 8-1 on November 14. Mailers currently using Mail.dat 8-1 to submit electronic documentation to PostalOne!^® are encouraged to migrate to Mail.dat 8-2, or use Mail.dat 9-1 if interested in participating in the Intelligent Mail Full-Service option.

Customer Registration Identification (CRID) Consolidation: A CRID is a customer registration number that is assigned for each unique business location that is or has been identified in our postal systems applications. A new CRID is created whenever a user enters a new address location when signing up for a business account through the Business Customer Gateway. Currently CRIDs are created when the combination of business name and address is unique. In many cases, multiple CRIDs have been created by many users of the same location. Such multiple CRID assignments are generally due to the manner in which the user creating the location account has entered the business name and/or location. Over time, numerous users have entered business name and location data into several postal systems.  As part of the May 11^th software release to support Full-Service Intelligent Mail, data from postal systems were centralized and were made available as part of the Business Customer Gateway customer user identification system. Some customers may have discovered having multiple location accounts (i.e., CRIDs) in the system. The intent of the CRID consolidation effort is to eliminate as much of the overpopulation of CRIDs as possible so that users have one CRID for each location, and all services are attached to that one CRID. We will engage in CRID clean up during the months of July and August and will notify mailers by letter of the results of any affected CRIDs. As part of the CRID consolidation effort, we will:

1.  Consolidate CRIDs for locations with same and/or similar addresses and assign one “winning” CRID to replace all related CRIDs. 

2.  Replace the old CRIDs across the various systems in Full-Service supporting functions of payment, scheduling, mail induction, and mailer identification with the winning CRID value.

3.  Merge records for Business Service Administrators (BSA), opt-in/opt-out choices, and pending requests.

Intelligent Mail Symposiums: The Intelligent Mail symposium scheduled for July 9 in Columbus Ohio has been postponed due to insufficient registration. It has been rescheduled at the same location, The Aladdin Shrine Center, 3850 Stelzer Rd, Columbus, OH, on October 6, 2009. We are hoping the Dallas/Fort Worth symposium, planned for July 16, will draw at least 150 attendees. We will continue to monitor registrations and advise you if a decision is made to change the date to the fall.

Assistance: Please call the PostalOne! Help Desk at 1-800-522-9085 if you have any questions or problems accessing the Business Customer Gateway, your accounts, or submitting electronic documentation.