“Ensuring a Viable Postal Service for America,” the Postal Service™ action plan for the next decade, describes a flexible, agile Postal Service that can adapt to America’s changing mailing habits and preferences. The Postal Service understands that to best serve the American people in 2020 and beyond, it must be leaner and more able to quickly respond to customer mailing and shipping needs. Earlier today Postmaster General John E. Potter addressed stakeholders to share plans and action steps to achieve that goal, including changes to delivery frequency, eliminating prepayment of retiree health benefits and expanding access to products and services.

The USPS is extending the comment period on this proposed Federal Register notice.

On November 18, 2009, USPS published a proposed rule in the Federal Register (74 FR 59494) to implement revenue assurance procedures for information-based indicia (IBI) postage generated from postage evidencing systems and PC Postage® products. omments were originally requested by December 18, 2009. USPS has decided to extend the current comment period an additional 60 days, until February 17, 2010. For more details, go toPostal Explorer atpe.usps.com, and click on Federal Registers Notices in the left frame.

An official notice will be published in theFederal Register and posted on Postal Explorer.

USPS HQ Business Mail Acceptance has made the decision to discontinue the Mailpiece Quality Control (MQC) course. It is currently offered as part of the Mail Design Professional (MDP) course. The next offering of the MDP course is scheduled for February 2010 at the National Center for Employee Development (NCED) in Norman, OK. Currently underway is the development of an online version of the MDP course which we hope to introduce at the National Postal Forum (NPF) in Nashville, TN in April 2010. For more information, please contact Cher Rupp-Ruggeri at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

The Move Update standard requires periodic matching of a mailer’s address records with customer-filed change-of-address (COA) orders. Its goal is to reduce the number of mailpieces in a mailing that require additional handling for forwarding or return.

The USPS filed notice with the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) to describe the new method Business Mail Entry Units (BMEU) will use to determine whether or not to assess the $0.07 Move Update charge to First-Class Mail and Standard Mail pieces evaluated during acceptance.

 Working through the Mailers’ Technical Advisory Committee (MTAC), the Postal Service™ and the mailing industry have agreed to set an 80% threshold for barcode readability verifications for letter and flat mailings using the Intelligent Mail barcodes.