Understanding Postal: Get Smart

If you mail at automation-discounted postal rates, your catalog will have to meet a host of new requirements next January, including the USPS’s Intelligent Mail Barcode (IMB).

The USPS last month issued its proposed rules on the requirements that go along with automation rates starting in January 2009. It goes beyond the IMB, although that in and of itself is a significant change. The Postal Service’s proposed rules would no longer allow the POSTNET barcode, which has been in use for nearly two decades, to qualify for automation discounts beginning in January 2009.