Thursday, May 7, 2009

Return to sender

For over a year now (I estimate), Canada Post has provided 'permanent' stamps. The purchase price for a permanent stamp is the going postage rate, but unlike denominated stamps, these stamps do not require additional postage when the price of sending a letter goes up. You can still buy denominated stamps, and I have an old book of $.55 stamps for sending letters to the US and $.46 stamps for mail within Canada. I just looked up the price of stamps at canadapost.ca, and holy cow they must be old because letter mail postage to the US is $.98 and $.54 within Canada. Inside the book of stamps, it says that "mail with insufficient postage will be returned to sender to make up the correct postage for re-mailing." How do they know where to return the mail? Well, that would be the return address that you specify on the letter. So, can anyone tell me why I might not just use an old $.46 stamp on a letter, and put down the recipient's address as the return address? Okay, as far as scams go, maybe this isn't the most lucrative, but still, I find it odd that the system puts so much trust in user input. Maybe it's the computer programmer in me...

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4 comments:

Unknown said...

I would suspect that when it gets kicked out at the sorting station and routed to the 'return to sender' section there is some sort of consideration on the return addresses post code relative to the sorting station...

so you could probably get a letter across the street or possibly across town, but getting a letter out of town might raise some flags.

Chris said...

Maybe I'll just have to conduct an experiment...

Unknown said...

Would a funding joke be inappropriate here?

Chris said...

Ouch. Touched a nerve, there.