I am convince that we no longer receive six days of delivery by the post office. What do you think?

Say goodbye to the same-day postmark

Last week the Postal Service posted a proposed rule in the Federal Register to revise the section of the Domestic Mail Manual that involves postmarking. The purpose of the rule, entitled “Postmarks and Postal Possession,” is to educate the public about postmarks. It discusses the history of postmarks, how they’re applied, how they’re used by government agencies and the private sector, and so on.

But all of this information serves primarily as background. The main purpose of the rule is to inform customers that they can no longer expect a postmark to show the date a piece was mailed.

The Postal Service says the DMM revision “does not signal and would not effect a change in postmarking procedures.” Instead, the Postal Service seeks to make customers aware that “the postmark date does not inherently or necessarily align with the date on which the Postal Service first accepted possession of a mailpiece.”

In other words, up till now, it’s been understood that date on the postmark is the date a piece was mailed, so long as it was deposited before the last collection, as indicated by signage at the post office or on the collection box. From now on, one can no longer make this assumption.

Nearly half of single-piece First Class Mail may end up being postmarked a day (or more) after the mail was sent at the post office, dropped in a collection box, or collected by a carrier. That makes the odds that a letter has a same-day postmark about 50-50.

Since 2021, the Postal Service has lowered the service standards for First Class mail two times, and it’s lowered the targets for on-time delivery as well. Historian Christopher Shaw, author of First Class:The U.S. Postal Service, Democracy, and the Corporate Threat, sums it up like this: “With the delivery delays and now the postmarks, it appears that the Postal Service is doing what it can to undermine First Class mail.”

The postmark is widely used as a deadline for legal purposes like tax documents, business contracts, and election ballots. The end of same-day postmarking will thus have far-reaching consequences.

This revision of the DMM has become necessary because the Postal Service is implementing an initiative called Regional Transportation Optimization as part of its Delivering for American Plan.

Traditionally, mail is transported from processing centers to post offices in the morning and then collected at post offices in the late afternoon or early evening for transport to the processing center.

Under the RTO initiative, the afternoon collection is eliminated, so the mail sits in the back of the post office overnight (as seen on the right), to be collected the next morning, when the day’s mail is dropped off. The RTO thus adds a day to delivery times, so earlier this year the Postal Service changed its service standards to reflect the extra day. But the RTO will impact postmarking as well; hence the proposed rule.