How do post offices sort mail

Mail arrives early at the post office, usually before the postmaster and mail carriers arrive for the day. The postmaster or postal clerk pulls the large metal cages of mixed mail into the post office and opens them. Then, the postmaster divides the parcels, magazines, large envelopes and other flats for the mail carriers and postal boxes. The postmaster has a sorting system that may involve tubs or shelves for dividing the mail by route. An assigned number identifies routes, for example, route one and route two.

The postmaster does not put the mail pieces into delivery order, just places them in the correct area for the route number. After dividing mail pieces for delivery routes, the postmaster or clerk will sort individual mail pieces into the post office PO box section, placing each mail piece manually into the correct post office box. Julia Fuller began her professional writing career eight years ago covering special-needs adoption.

Source: Business Insider. For you. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options.

Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. Good Subscriber Account active since Shortcuts. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Or a big mailing firm might pull a tractor trailer up to a big sorting and bulk-distribution center. And then it cancels the [stamp] and applies the postmark. But those cases are pretty rare. Once the mail has been canceled, it goes into the sorting part of the machine.

The optical character reader will read the address and spray a bar code on the front of the of the mail piece that indicates [where it should go]. All that can be placed on planes or trucks and sent out of the sorting-and-distribution center to the local post office for delivery.

When the letter arrives at the local distribution-and-processing center, it gets put into machines that sort mail now—not by city or by zip code but by actual carrier route within the city. Now [when they] arrive in the morning, the mail is already delivered from the distribution center to the local post office, sorted in that walk order. The first part of the mail-processing workflow to be automated was the canceling of postage stamps, which had been done by hand almost exclusively up until around the turn of the 20th century.

But that still required a person to handle every piece of mail: orient it the right way to go through the canceling machines, make sure that the stamp is in the upper right-hand corner, and so forth. It remained almost totally manual until the late s—in a sense, we figured out how to sort the mail and put a man in space at about the same time.

Some beginning mailers choose not to presort their mail; instead, they pay the full First-Class Mail price, put stamps on their mailpieces, and drop them in a collection box. That's easy! Other mailers don't want to presort their mail but still want to get the lower postage prices. To do that, they use a presort bureau or letter shop to prepare their mail.