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Rebate companies use the mail to accomplish their fraud. Here's how to complain to the U.S. Post Office: Mail Fraud Complaint Form.

Uh....we call it certified mail over here. To most closely match what you're talking about, you would need to request Return Receipt with it.

http://www.usps.com/send/waystosendmail/extraservi ces/certifiedmailservice.htm

The Postal Service in Germany offers a service called PostIdent. Customers and third parties can rely on this service. I am sure there is a post office in your neighborhood. Why is this service not available in the US?

http://www.deutschepost.de/dpag?lang=de_DE&xmlFile =6394
http://www.usps.com/all/welcome.htm?from=homedoorw aybar&page=0019allproducts

Email and Fax tend to be taken comparatively less seriously than genuine hand carried dead trees, although they're not ignored.

If you want to send with an impact, you can still send a letter Registered Return Receipt . Use of RRR is best saved for when you're trying to send your pet^H^H^Hduly elected official the message that if he doesn't pay attention right now, you'll not only vote against him, but be actively contributing to and campaigning on behalf of anyone who opposes his reelection. For a more modest "you're losing my vote" level of "pay attention", a regular snail mail letter tends to work well — a bit more so if it's handwritten with decent penmanship.

You brought out a really good point.

My package delivery done with USPS was nothing but excellent and I wouldn't expect anything less.

http://www.usps.com/all/optionsforreceivingmail/we lcome.htm

Can the same level of service be provided by FedEx and UPS? I don't think so. FedEx and UPS, IMHO, are not in the business of delivery TO people, they are in business of delivery FROM people. I can only count until number infinity, the times I had to deal with FedEx and UPS about packages are discarded, kicked, dragged, damaged and mishandled. USPS Priority has been my choice of shippment and I prefer USPS Priority as a reciever.

It's just mind boggling that people think less of United States Postal Service even just in general. The number of postal service stations and volume of mail delivery on daily basis just dwarfs the volume of deliveries FedEx and UPS have to deal with.

the USPS is one of those bulk shippers - $6.3 billionover 7 years. Priority Mail is sent via FedEx

"I'm about to go postal"

Just thought I'd point out that apparently the United States Postal Service frequently complains about the use of the phrase "going postal."

Regarding the actual content of your post, I'm actually surprised that it didn't go up more than 44% during that time period.

"I'm about to go postal"

Just thought I'd point out that apparently the United States Postal Service frequently complains about the use of the phrase "going postal."

Regarding the actual content of your post, I'm actually surprised that it didn't go up more than 44% during that time period.

"I'm about to go postal"

Just thought I'd point out that apparently the United States Postal Service frequently complains about the use of the phrase "going postal."

Regarding the actual content of your post, I'm actually surprised that it didn't go up more than 44% during that time period.

"I'm about to go postal"

Just thought I'd point out that apparently the United States Postal Service frequently complains about the use of the phrase "going postal."

Regarding the actual content of your post, I'm actually surprised that it didn't go up more than 44% during that time period.

"I'm about to go postal"

Just thought I'd point out that apparently the United States Postal Service frequently complains about the use of the phrase "going postal."

Regarding the actual content of your post, I'm actually surprised that it didn't go up more than 44% during that time period.

"I'm about to go postal"

Just thought I'd point out that apparently the United States Postal Service frequently complains about the use of the phrase "going postal."

Regarding the actual content of your post, I'm actually surprised that it didn't go up more than 44% during that time period.

"I'm about to go postal"

Just thought I'd point out that apparently the United States Postal Service frequently complains about the use of the phrase "going postal."

Regarding the actual content of your post, I'm actually surprised that it didn't go up more than 44% during that time period.

Only the peasants in Soviet America pay 39 cents to send letters. Businesses pay one-tenth the amount.

Are you uninformed or a troll? To get discouts on bulk-mailings business jump through a bunch of hoops like presorting, bundling, and barcoding their own mail. These mailings also aren't sent First Class. Essentially, the bulk mailers are saving USPS work, and USPS is rewarding them with an appropriately lower rate.

If you care to inform yourself

I'm one of those sellers who only accepts PayPal, aside from more expensive items ($300-$400+). Why? It's a real hassle to get to the bank, and I'd rather spend the 30-60 minutes I would have spent depositing the MO doing other things. Money orders also mean greater turnaround time (I don't sell many things, but for those who do, turnaround time may mean a lot). If you're worried about fraud, then use a credit card through PayPal. Mail fraud cases take a long time to get sorted out. Chargebacks are relatively fully featured.

After more digging than I had suspected, I'm both right and wrong ;-)

http://www.usps.com/forms/_pdf/ps1500.pdf

Shows that you can stop unwanted 'sexual/obscene' mailings, so I suppose it's something but not the end all mass block I seem to remember was available to all bulk mailings.

Just like voice and proximity have something over email, there's a kind of concretion in the physical missal.

Registered/Certified mail is one way to prove that they got your rebate. Always use one of those options for anything important or valuable.

http://pe.usps.com/text/dmm100/adding.htm

ZIP+4 is a 9-digit code that uniquely identifies a particular delivery point (house or apartment). This code appears on the mailing label of all magazine subscriptions, utility bills, etc., because the United States Postal Service requires large-volume mailers to use ZIP+4 in order to get lower postage rates. ZIP+4 can also be looked up online via http://www.usps.com/zip4/welcome.htm?from=home&pag e=2132findzip . There is exactly one total effective tax rate per ZIP+4.

Chargebacks are your friend! If you paid with a credit card, make the fraud eBay/PayPal's problem, not yours.

If you paid through the mail, there's these friendly people. Nobody knows they exist until it's too late.

For example, my favorite public-facing web service has got to be the USPS address correction web service, but if a company were to exploit this API, any press they create for it would probably read "Company ABC in partnership with USPS to increase mail delivery productivity".

U.S. Postal Service's National Change of Address.
https://moversguide.usps.com/?referral=USPS

See section E of the term and conditions.

http://ribbs.usps.gov/files/ncoalink/CERTIFIED_LIC ENSEES/
http://ribbs.usps.gov/files/ncoalink/CERTIFIED_LIC ENSEES/FULL.PDF

The Post Office uses the Internet for most of it's business you insensitive clod! https://moversguide.usps.com/?referral=USPS

It is also interesting to see the most popular web sites. Start by typing www. into google suggest. The top 10 are:

1. www.yahoo.com - Search/Directory
2. www.hotmail.com - Email
3. www.google.com - Search
4. www.ebay.com - Shopping
5. www.msn.com - Portal
6. www.aol.com - Portal
7. www.ebay.co.uk - Shopping
8. www.irs.gov - Government
9. www.mapquest.com - Maps
10. www.amazon.com - Shopping

Typing one more letter shows you the top sites for that letter. Here is the top for each letter:

• a is for www.aol.com - Portal
• b is for www.bbc.co.uk - News
• c is for www.cnn.com - News
• d is for www.dictionary.com - Reference
• e is for www.ebay.com - Shopping
• f is for www.food.gov.uk - Government
• g is for www.google.com - Search
• h is for www.hotmail.com - Email
• i is for www.irs.gov - Government
• j is for www.juno.com - Internet service provider
• k is for www.kbb.com - Consumer information
• l is for www.lyrics.com - Music
• m is for www.msn.com - Portal
• n is for www.nick.com - Kids
• o is for www.orbitz.com - Travel
• p is for www.pogo.com - Games
• q is for www.qvc.com - Shopping
• r is for www.rotten.com - Information
• s is for www.sears.com - Shopping (sorry slashdot)
• t is for www.target.com - Shopping
• u is for www.usps.com - Government
• v is for www.verizon.com - Telephone service
• w is for www.weather.com - Weather
• x is for www.xanga.com - Blogs
• y is for www.yahoo.com - Portal
• z is for www.zappos.com - Shopping

This is some random commentary to make sure that my post has enough characters per line on average to get by the lameness filter. Just a few more words should do it. Then I will be over the limit. Maybe you would like to hear a bit about my projects: Attesoro - A internationalization editor for Java programs. Coinmill - A currency conversion website with many currencies, and features such as abilty to parse English sentences asking for currency conversion. Java Utilities - Utilities for common task in the Java programming language such as parsing CSV files and string manipulation.

something tells me the mail might not get through to New Orleans addresses for a while...

Something like this, perhaps.

bah...just get a roll of labels and use that to paste your boxes together

http://shop.usps.com/cgi-bin/vsbv/postal_store_non _ssl/display_products/productDetail.jsp?OID=100357 7

But of course, "misuse may be a violation of federal law"!

From http://www.usps.com/strategicplanning/cs04/

In 1976 the Postal Service filed its first annual comprehensive statement to comply with an amendment to the 1970 Postal Reorganization Act. The amendment, now codified as Title 39, United States Code (USC), Section 2401 (e), required that a comprehensive statement accompany the annual Postal Service budget submission to Congress. The amendment further required the Postal Service to explain and address 1) the plans, policies, and procedures designed to comply with the statutory mission of the Postal Service; 2) general postal operations, including data on service standards, mail volume, productivity, trends in postal operations, and analyses of the impact of internal and external factors upon the Postal Service; 3) financial information relating to expenditures and obligations incurred; and 4) other matters necessary to ensure that Congress is "fully and currently consulted and informed on postal operations."

From Wikipedia:
"The United States Postal Service (USPS) is the United States government-owned corporation...".

So maybe they are technically no longer a branch of the govt, but they certainly are wholly owned by it, which sounds to me like they are still run by the government. You'll also remember that the USPS can't raise postal rates without congressional approval either.

And from a Priority Mail box I have:

"This packaging is the property of the U.S. Postal Service and is provided solely for use in sending Priority Mail. Misuse may be a violation of Federal law."

Betcha won't find that on a private corporation's packages...

Here's that USPS URL:

http://shop.usps.com/cgi-bin/vsbv/postal_store_non _ssl/home.jsp

Ed Foster of Infoworld described a situation with a license agreement on a pharmaceutical book. The shrinkwrapped book was mailed to a physician. The license on the book claimed that the book was the property of Omnicare. Breaking the seal would indicate acceptance of the license. Those who did not accept the license terms were directed to "promptly return the material unopened to your local Omnicare pharmacy." Furthermore, the license would "terminate immediately if the Licensee or his or her employer ceased to be an Omnicare customer." The physician was not an Omnicare customer, so keeping the book or disposing of it might violate the license either way. Would it come down to shipping the book back or becoming an Omnicare customer? Note: Postal regulations state that individuals are not obligated to return unsolicited goods.

Another article from Ed Foster talks about EULAs on non-software items, including a digital camera.

In the U.S., all that "junk mail" actually subsidizes the cost of carrying letters and packages.

The cost to transport a letter from one end of the country to the other is actually significantly more than 37, but the difference is made up by presorted bulk mail, which is billed at a slightly higher rate than the actual cost of carriage and sorting. Basically the Post Office gives a discount for presorted mail, which is slightly LESS than the actual cost savings to the Post Office (because of employee time saved, I suppose) as a result of the presorting.

If all the junk mail sent via the USPS just stopped flowing tomorrow, the system would run out of money pretty quickly. People don't send enough letters and packages to keep the system going by themselves.

I have no idea how the postal system in Finland works, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it probably involves a large injection of public tax-derived funds. In the U.S., the Post Office is entirely self-funded, and has been since 1982 (cite). One exception to this might be the security measures put in place after the 2001 anthrax scares, but I'm not sure.

ZabaSearch

He's the first Eric E. Schmidt on zabasearch. The issue is that he needs to get over the fact that privacy does not exist, unless you accidentally fill out false Change of Address forms every month.

And why not? You can print stamps, after all.

Paypal and the like are fine for pure electronic transactions, but being able to issue your own checks/currency on paper that you could take down to some storefront vendor and have them punch in your name and 20 digit number (or read it from the bar code) would make everyone happy (except VISA and its member banks who exert monopoly like control over the transaction fees).

I would guess the biggest problems with setting up a personal line of credit system based on public key cryptography and 3rd party certificates from anyone who wanted to be a banker are not technical problems, but rather political problems with intruding onto someone else's existing scheme for making money.

Sure, you can be a bank if you comply with these 48 lb books of barriers to entry , er, I mean, regulations to protect the consumer. (Yes, it's an oversimplification, but there's plenty of margin for profit in tailored industry regulations as the FDA evidences.)

Anyone who has paid 18% credit card interest ( or even 5% on a mortgage) and gotten paid 1.2 % on their bank balances knows there's got to be some slack built into that system.

Then, pay three bucks to send the letter by certified mail with return receipt.

And don't even bother leaving your chair! Not meaning to sound like a commercial, but US Postal Service NetPost allows one to send certified mail online. :-) They take text or a word document in a secure web page, then send it to a printer somewhere in meatspace and drop it in the mail for you.

http://www.usps.com/mailingonline/faq.htm

I used this service a number of times in chasing my health insurance provider (fucked up payments), mortgage company (forgot to pay property taxes), and even the City of Boston (do they do anything right?).

One interesting thing you can do is declare that their mailings are obscene and that you want them to cease and desist. The form: http://www.usps.com/forms/_pdf/ps1500.pdf.
Federa l courts have ruled that the determination of obscenity is in the mind of the recipient. http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?c ourt=US&vol=397&invol=728 Failure of a company to comply with the cease and desist subjects them to severe fines. US Code Title 39 part IV Chapter 30 Section 3001. Enjoy.

You do realize that was UPS, not USPS that lost the tapes, don't you?

Frankly, Registered Mail, as offered by the US Postal Snail, would have been the way to go.

No, they're two-letter capitals only. The other way is how grandma writes it.

Like some other industries that have already been decimated*, and some others that are yet to come (e.g. broadcast TV)...

"That's one thing you really don't ever have to worry about the private sector allowing."

"There is nothing that pissess off government bureaucrats than the idea that the citizenry can go elsewhere and completely ignore them."

https://www.usps.com/postalinspectors/fraud/MailFr audComplaint.htm

If you dont get your rebate back and it doesnt look like you ever will after contacting the company you can always fill out a mail fraud complaint with the US Postal Service.

One time a friend of mine bought a certain brand of cd burner at a time when the company was having financial trouble and decided to stop filling rebates. My friend filled out a mail fraud complaint and after the Post Office investigated it and found that the company was guilty, they stopped delivering any mail to that compnay. The only way the company could get mail again is if they resolved the issue with my friend because my friend had to sign some paperwork allowing the company to start recieving mail again. After that, the company sent my friend a hand written and signed rebate check for the disputed amount.

So, while rebates may be a pain, there are multiple ways to ensure that you get your $$$ back from the companies.

A lot of people have talked about writing "See ID" on the back of the card for the merchant to check. I've dealt with this before, and if the merchant is following the proper procedures (visa here), they should make you sign the card before they will accept it. The US Postal service will not accept it at all.

So this should only be a one-off for people who do it, although from my experience and most of the reports here it seems that very few places follow through on this even if they check.

As for the main question, are the sigs useless? Well no, they're not foolproof but act as a line of defense which makes fraud a bit harder, puts off some people from trying it and maybe gets some fraudsters caught.

In regards to shipping books, the USPS has special information for sending _only_ bound printed matter. Link

Fortunately, the United States Postal Service has already published instructions on how to pack a hippo.

No information on evolutionary history. For that, Dawkins' Ancestor's Tale is highly recommended. Mentions the hippo specifically.

The United States Postal Service has a XML API you can use to intergrate into any software or website you write so you can calcuate shipping costs and print labels. If the USPS can do that, I imagine its possible for the IRS to create some sort of XML Tax API.

... would be if they ALSO sued the US Postal Service . How many bootlegged Metallica tracks did they aid and abet?

Here's the letter I wrote my rep:

Dear Representative Waxman,

Congratulations on your recent re-election, and thank you for your diligence regarding the disturbing trends coming out of Iraq contracts and their recipients. I wonder if you could turn your attention to another abuse of governmental power: the FCC. In response to a recent lawsuit questioning whether the FCC could regulate HDTV transmissions after their reception in a household, the agency responded with the letter linked here http://scrawford.net/courses/04-1037%20(Amer.Lib.) %20FCC%20Brief.pdf You could probably find it another way, but that's how I saw it. To be frank, it is appalling. The FCC has decided they have the power to regulate: my television, my computer, my iPod, my cellphone, my telephone, and anything else that falls under this language: "'associated with the overall circuit of messages sent and received' via all interstate radio and wire communication."

With the recent election, it looks like we're going to head in a direction that says the government controls our bodies, can we do anything to keep them from controlling all of our stuff too?

sadly while reading your post i took a little dive into the future. i see a U.S. government controlled and funded service which legally bombards our email systems.

~heck they need to, nobody's sending letters anymore. That or tax it.

How many does somone or a comany need to buy to "avoid" ambiguity. I mean every slashdot is taken except slashdot.name, and it kills me that slashdot.com gets any hits for the website slashdot.org. Slashdot used to not even redirect or give you a bozo message for accessing slashdot.com, it just threw the contents of slahdot.org at you.

What are the points of TLDs? I thought they were to avoid ambiguity, yet they promote it. Remember the whitehouse.com vs. whitehouse.gov thing? How about the current suprnova.org vs. suprnova.com and suprnova.net? The USPS can't figure out if they are a .gov or a .com. Same with the US Marines. Are they a .mil or a .com. Keep in mind that .com is supposed to be for commercial stuff. I guess the military is the biggest business in the US, but thats another post.

How many "normal" people know more than the .com domain?

I go on these rants from time to time, and I feel as though I'm in the vast minority of people that see no purpose of TLDs, but can anyone give one example of their utility? I have found one guy on the net that agrees with me and the /.er that pointed me out to that page, but otherwise they keep making more of them and making them longer and more silly.

Now, the only useful thing for TLDs is to separate countries. Why? Because countries have different languages and currencies. I get pissed when I do a google search for something and end up at a brittish site. I have nothing against the brits, but its stupid for me to look at buying a $10 trinket from there. Its not too common, but I've ended up at UK .com sites and was not happy. /rant

I've yet to meet a site that *forces* me to use IE, but there are certainly some sites that make more sense with IE.

The USPS ZIP Code Lookup, for example. If you accidentally enter the city on the 2nd line rather than the 3rd line and try to submit, in IE you get red text informing you that you must enter a city. In Firefox (0.9, at least), you get nothing. You have to guess what you did wrong.

That's one small example; other pages get even weirder in non-IE browsers, to the point of not being usable. There's a reason Firefox has a "View this page in IE" plugin.

Before people say the obvious -- that the page designers are using non-standard HTML, CSS, whatever -- please consider this: most users don't know CSS from shinola, and don't care. They just want their pages to work.

1. Looking up your 9-digit Zip code
2. Then use said Zip code to find your representatives
3. Email all your representatives for U.S. Senate and U.S. House.

You might also want to write the editor of your local newspaper.