PUSHING THE ENVELOPE BLOG

The thought of mail traveling by rail conjures up a picture of railway mail clerks sorting letters as a train rolls along into the night. Traditional railway mail service ended long ago, fading away as the use of passenger rail diminished and new methods of sorting mail by machine arose. The last run of a Railway Post Office was in 1977. Today, the Postal Service mostly contracts with truck carriers for long-haul surface transportation, although it still uses rail occasionally. Intermodal ser

Any organization with a computer network is concerned about cybersecurity, and the U.S. Postal Service has one of the world’s largest IT networks. It connects 1.1 million devices and includes 92.5 petabytes of storage. (A petabyte is a million gigabytes.) As cyberattacks targeting critical infrastructure continue to increase in frequency and sophistication, keeping networks and data safe from threats is an ever-evolving challenge. One way the OIG helps the Postal Service protect its IT infrastru

Inflation has reached record levels this year, and just about everything from the effects of the pandemic to the war in Ukraine have been cited as contributing factors. For a lot of people, the impacts of inflation are usually quick and direct — the price of that gallon of gas you bought this week compared to last week — but it’s a more complex story when it comes to the U.S. Postal Service. As we report in our latest white paper, inflation affects the Postal Service in different ways. For examp

The U.S. Postal Service has approximately 300 mail processing facilities. Some of these facilities perform better than others, some perform worse, and some struggle to reach even average performance. Our auditors examined 10 historically low performing facilities to find out why. When selecting the 10 facilities, the audit team looked for facilities that handled at least 1 billion mail pieces in 2020 and had lower on-time service performance and mail processing productivity. They also factored i

Did you know the U.S. Postal Service has a legally mandated program that allows blind or other physically handicapped people to send and receive certain types of mail at no charge? Established more than a century ago — well before the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 — the program is known as Free Matter for the Blind. What qualifies as Free Matter? Large-type (14-point or larger) documents, braille, audio recordings, and talking book players. When mailed domestically, Free Matter is to b