I spoke to a postal employee about this 10 years or so ago, and he claimed that it was an eyeball search only. He admitted that there was no way to tell if the stamp had been cancelled, was the wrong denomination, and the truth was that people could get away with sending a letter if the stamp passed a quick visual test.
Was that the case, and is that the case now? I imagine the technology would exist to somehow scan for the ink on a stamp (if you tried to reuse one), but what about if you made a good photocopy and put it on the right paper, glued it in the corner and sent it on its way? Does the post office rely on the fact that people are basically honest and the 37 cents isn’t worth the trouble to try to cheat the system? Or is the technology in place to capture illegal mailings on a such a large scale that the odds of slipping one in are minimal? How difficult would it be, for example, to counterfeit a machine stamped letter? How about placing my address on the envelope as the receiver, and place the intended recipient in the return address field and leave postage off. Maybe that would work once or twice, but I’d guess a pattern would emerge with any volume. Unlike cash, there doesn’t seem to be any built-in security features. Maybe it’s not worth it, as I would guess it’s not worth it to put security features on a quarter. But a vending machine can usually tell the difference between a Canadian and American quarter.
I guess I could try all this out myself, but 37 cents seems reasonable to me so I don’t bother.
I don’t know the answer to most of that but I can say from experience that the Post Office does know when you have insufficent postage as I’ve had to actually pay fifteen cents to get a letter out of hock before when the sender didn’t account for the weight.
To elaborate on my conversation… my friend was a mail carrier. He noticed a letter he was delivering had a “Mickey Mouse” picture pasted in the corner. Exactly the same size as the standard stamp, but clearly not a stamp. Perhaps it was just a funny story, but again, he did tell me that it was visual inspection only. This was before anthrax appeared in letters, however.
Some conscientious postal workers, if they see a letter which feels a bit heavy and only carries one first-class stamp, will weigh it on a scale and stamp it RTS if there’s not enough postage. Others don’t care. Once a piece of mail gets into the sorting installation, it depends largely on the people throwing into the cases, and perhaps the route carriers. At least it was like this when I got a gig there as a casual 5 years ago.
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