Why do the first, third, and fourth letters of your last name appear on junk mail/magazine labels? For example, if your last name were “Adams”, you would find on your label (which probably also says “CAR-RT SORT”) the letters AAM, followed by the number of your street address, and then some other numbers and letters I can’t quite decipher. (Another magazine label I found has my zip code before the three letters.) I’m sure that this identifies me as the recipient in some way, but, if you are going to abbreviate my last name, why leave the second letter out? Why AAM instead of ADA?
This might help in answering you question. The first line of a presort is usually the endorsement line it looks sometimes like this ******AUTO3-DIGIT 100. it is generated by presort software when you do a sort of a database. I personally use them to tell the beginning and the end of a tray for first class mail . Now if the mail piece is going out standard then they are needed to designate the packs. I could explain a lot more but postal regulations are extremely dull and long . Here is a link to the right section in the USPS Domestic Mail Manual ( which is 1018 pages btw) . It explains endorsement lines in great detail.
Thanks for your reply, dvman, and welcome to the SDMB!
The page you linked to did a good job of explaining the line above the line where the abbreviated last name appears, but not the line where the abbreviation appears itself. I did some searching at the USPS site, and I haven’t found anything yet.
The abbreviation appears in the second line of the label. I looked at three different magazine labels from different addresses of my past, and it looks like this line is an abbreviation of the address. If your name was Cecil Adams and you lived on 1234 Main St., I think that line would look something like this:
#AAM1234M(three-digit number*)#
*The three digit number, in my case, always starts with “09”–for example, 093, 094, 096.
I’m still curious as to why they abbreviate your last name this way (first, third, and fourth letters). Also, what happens if your last name is, say, only three letters long?
Magazine publishers and other organizations which have a business relationship with you (as opposed to junk mailers) need to have a Customer ID# to associate you with their computer database for billing purposes, etc.
They have computer algorithms that take certain combinations from your name and address to generate a unique identifier. This algorithm may vary from publisher to publisher, but if they use the same software one will be similar to another.