Feds: Postal Service photographs every piece of mail it processes

Re:Feds: Postal Service photographs every piece of mail it p... by HarryHirsch on Friday June 07, 2013 @08:26PM (#5843015)

I thought it had been common knowledge that the way handwritten mail is sorted is that it is barcoded and photographed, and then the address is keyed on by a human.

It doesn't take much imagination that these days each such address is kept, and that the three-letter agencies have a sample of everyone's handwriting, in case it is needed.

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Re:Feds: Postal Service photographs every piece of mail it p... by akira2501 on Friday June 07, 2013 @10:57PM (#5843520)

Only if the OCR couldn't process it, although the OCR has gotten a lot better so the "Remote Encoding Centers" see a lot less volume. You could always tell when your mail failed the OCR in the past because it would have a faint orange barcode printed on it -- this was used to track it through the human encoding system at the RECs.

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