For Paul W. Hankins

1. Mail’s Journey
Mitchell Brooks
Spring 2012

2. What is mail?
• Mail or postage is the of
sending and receiving of
letters or parcels through
the postal system such as
USPS
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3. How Does Mail Work?
• Mail starts its journey when it is picked up by
mail vans in residential and public mailboxes
which are driven to the nearest post office
where sorting begins.
• A mild presorting begins separating
international and national mail which is then
sent to a much larger facility where machines
sort mail.

4. Mechanical Sorting
• After contents are sorted by size, they are sent to
automatic sorting. The first machine checks
letters for stamps. USPS postal stamps have an
invisible fluorescent glow strip this machine
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checks for. If the
machine does not
find a glow strip, the
letter is sent back to
sender. Letters with
appropriate stamps
are marked so they
cannot be reused.

5. Mechanical Sorting
• The next machine that sorts these letters is
call the Multiline Optical Character Reader
which processes up to 30,000 letters. It reads
the address, takes a digital photo of the
address, matches the address with the
computer’s worldwide address book, then
prints the postal code in barcode format on
the front of the envelope. If this machine
cannot read the address, it is withheld and a
worker much decipher the address.

6. Mechanical Sorting
• Now, a scanner reads the barcode and starts
the actual sorting. Machines separate large
amounts of mail destined for different post
offices throughout the country and world
where more humans will do the separating
instead of machines.
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7. Delivery
• This sorting process for international mail may
happen up to 5 times.
• After it has reached the final postal office before
delivery, mail trucks are loaded with mail sorted
by route by workers.
• This whole process for parcels and letters may
take 8 business days. The wait for packages in the
mail is longer because of their varied
size, machines cannot scan the addresses so it is
all done by hand.

8. USPS Government Funding and
Competition
• With the yearly 212 billion pieces of
mail, USPS cannot keep up by themselves
which is why companies such as FedEx and
UPS deliver packages and mail for more cost
but usually better or faster than the USPS.
• USPS has been in the red every year since
1997 which is why the government has
considered shutting USPS down.

9. The Pony Express
• The first United States postal service was the Pony
Express, the only postal service in the US from April
1960 to October 1961.
• The Pony Express relayed mail through
Sacramento, Missouri, and California on a 2,000 mile
track where mail was delivered and received much like
it is today by mail vans.
• The riders would travel the trail on one horse for 10 –
15 miles and would switch horses at the next station.
Riders would be done riding after 75 – 100 miles.
• Riders would pick up mail at post stations as well as
drop off mail for the respective stations every 10 days.

10. Works Cited
1. Business Ink. 2008. Photograph. n.p.
2. How It's Made Mail. 2010. Photograph. n.p.
3. Universal Postage. 2007. Photograph. n.p.