IMb and Postage

Starting in March 2010, the USPS will stop “round stamping” postage statements. The reason is cost. Often a single mailing may have thirty or more statements and the time required to validate and stamp them is simply too much in today’s financial environment. However, contrary to postal belief, mail owners rarely, if ever, access PostalOne to see their postage for mailings. With IMb-FS, the USPS thought that so many mailers would be using it that electronic postage would suffice.  This is not the case.  In recognition of this situation the USPS has created postage form 3607 which is a postage receipt. This will be the “hard copy” document to replace round stamped postage statements.

In light of this issue a question came up within Harte-Hanks as to whether mail owners should use our postal permit as opposed to one of their own. It would make sense that with all the parties identified in the mail.dat file sets associated with individual mailings that the mail owner might be able to access only those mailings with their IDs on Harte-Hanks’ postage permit.

I posed this question to “the” postal experts in charge of IMb and PostalOne and the answer was not positive.  If a mail owner were to gain access to Harte-Hanks’ or any other mail service provider’s postage permit, they would see everything -- all mailings regardless of mail owner. The point of this information is to let readers know that if you use a mail preparer’s postage permit you will have to rely on the hardcopy 3607 receipts. Perhaps some day in the future this will be addressed.