Postal Return Shenanigans

[Syonyk]

I recently came across something interesting in the postal codes related to the Business Reply Mail - those prepaid return envelopes.

In decades past, you used to be able to tape those to a brick and cost the permit holders large sums of money on the delivery. The post office, some while back, added some phrasing to their codes to permit the discarding of “obviously nonsense.”

But. Those same codes require the delivery of “sealed mail pieces.”

https://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/505.htm

1.3.8 Improper Use of Labels and Misuse of BRM Cards and Envelopes

Improper use of BRM labels or misuse of BRM cards or envelopes should be handled as follows:

1. When a BRM label is improperly used or a BRM card or envelope is misused as a label to return an unsealed item such as a brick, two-by-four, or similar item, the Postal Service may treat the item as waste to be disposed of at the discretion of the Post Office.
2. When a BRM card or envelope is misused and affixed to a sealed item, the permit holder will be responsible for payment of the applicable Retail postage and per piece fee.

So, by my reading, attaching these bits of nuisance to sealed packages up to either 13oz or 5lb, will cost them quite a bit more.

However, I believe the postal service can still get rid of stuff it deems unreasonable.

I do believe I’ll ship some hand mined basalt to a few of my less favorite spammers…

[Symbioquine]

Not to give anyone here bad ideas… but I suppose one could argue that MDF is really just super heavy-weight paper. By my calculations 1/2" MDF would be ~“2754 lb paper” according the the way paper is graded. (Compare that to normal paper which clocks in at around 20 - 140 lbs per 500 17"x22" sheets.)

A 49"x97" sheet of MDF could yield 44 A4 sheets. Actually printing on them would be left as an exercise to the reader…