I couldn’t find any single 41 cent stamps (only had books of 20) everywhere I went and I really need to mail a letter. i bought 50 one cent stamps. Can I put them all over the envelope in lieu of the single stamp? Are there any rules about placement (overlap, all on one side, etc.) Thanks!
Well, I did a little better googling and it appears as if there isn’t a limit:
Improper or too much postage will get your letter examined by the Postal Inspectors and very likely by [del]the SS[/del] Homeland Security. That’s one of the tell-tales for postal bombs, among other things.
Thanks for the info, but this is just a regular sized white envelope with a sheet of paper. I won’t be mailing a box or real large envelope that would raise suspicions.
When my sister was in college (postage at the time was 29 cents, IIRC), there was a vending machine on campus that sold stamps, and gave change in the form of single, one-cent stamps. Lots of times though, people wouldn’t bother taking the penny stamps and just leave them hanging from the machine. Well, my sister would take them whenever she happened to spot them and use them to mail letters home. Most of the front of the envelope would be covered by them and the letters were still delivered.
As long as the total is correct, there shouldn’t be a problem.
And if the weight of the stamps puts you over the limit, you’lll have to add additional stamps. That’s how they get ya.
Several years ago at a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum they had a display of some of the wacky correspondence Robert Ripley received. One guy mailed him a letter in an envelope made entirely from stamps.
Believe it…or don’t.
That would no longer work – it doesn’t meet various USPS mailing requirements. (Though they would probably deliver it anyway, just because of the uniqueness.)
The effective limit on the number of stamps would be the amount of room to place them properly on the envelope.
- you can’t cover up the return address spot.
- you can’t cover up the delivery address.
- you are required to leave at least 1/4" open space on all sides of the delivery address.
- you are required to leave open space in the lower right where they put the delivery bar code. Basically at least 1/2" up from the bottom of the envelope, extending from the right edge to the mid-point of the envelope.
- postage stamps are supposed to stay within the upper right of the envelope; to the right of the return address and above the delivery address.
For a single first-class letter, the USPS isn’t too strict about these requirements. But if you are mailing a whole batch of letters, or a business doing any kind of bulk mailing, they get very exacting about following the rules.
On a related tangent, I was wondering this:
Does the sorting office really weigh each and every package and then look at the value of stamps to check there is sufficent postage, and (for countries with more than one rate) whether it qualifies for first or second class?
I ask this because the other week, just before Father’s Day, I posted a parcel to my father. Normally these days you get a printed label that shows how much postage you have paid and has a big “1st” or “2nd” to indicate the first- or second-class mail. However the post office was closed so I weighed the parcel, looked up the correct postage rate for first class mail, stuck on the right stamps and posted it in a box with a later collection. I wondered whether I should have written “FIRST CLASS” on it to make sure it got into the priority stream, or whether there is some poor guy whose job it is to weigh parcels and count stamps.
It got there the next day, so I guess there is…
They’re not looking at number of stamps, they’re looking at value of postage. Apparently, people who send mailbombs often put way too much postage (value-wise) on the package, to make sure it doesn’t get returned.
I’ve used multiple stamps many times. Usually when I had a few small-value stamps, and my [del]cheap-ass[/del] frugal nature wouldn’t let me forget about them. I used a couple of extra postcard stamps for first-class postage, after adding some 3 cent stamps I had lying around, and getting a couple of 10 cent stamps at the post office. I think the math went 23 + 10 + 3 + 3 = 39 (This was before the latest rate increase.) I’ve never plastered several dozen penny stamps on an envelope, however.
Hah! I never thought of that. It sounds like something that would happen to Wile E. Coyote.
A post office employee once screwed up on a mailing I was sending out. In a nutshell, I was sending something express which had to be returned by express, and both required Flat Rate stamps, which were $14.40. Well, the guy got the right stamp on the outer envelope, but on the envelope to be enclosed in my mailing for the return of the documents, he accidentally put a Priority Mail stamp on it, which was only $4.05 (in his defense, the pictures on the stamps are fairly similar; they may have even been identical at that time). So, the guy had to fumble through his drawers for additional stamps to make it add up to $14.40. The envelope ended up with quite an eclectic collection of stamps on it, probably about 13 in all. I think I kept the return envelope, because it was kinda funny to me; I’ll see if I still have it.
I did this in college (circa 1991 or so) and the letter was delivered. I still have it somewhere (perhaps in my college trunk in the garage).
On eBay you can get bulk lots of unused US postage stamps at below face value. Plenty of people over the last 50 years or so bought large quantities of commemorative stamps as an investment, but:
(1) too many people had the same idea, and
(2) interest in collecting stamps is declining, partly because people get fewer stamps in the mail.
So now a lot of those old collections are coming on the market.
I had a friend in Australia who was a coin dealer, but who had an accumulation of unused US stamps – some damaged by water so they had stuck together – with a face value in the hundreds of dollars. I bought them off him for about half face value. When postage was 39 cents, I generally used 3 x 13-cent stamps for a letter. Now I use 2 x 13-cent stamps plus 1 15-cent stamp.
Back when stamps were raised to $0.22, I had a bunch of $0.01 stamps, so I pasted 22 of them on the envelope, and it went through just fine. Granted, 22 < 41 as noted in the OP, but the point is the same.
I also had a friend send me a letter in a clear plastic envelope he’d made by hand. the address was on a piece of masking tape. It was completely conventional, except that it was see-through. The USPS delivered it.
I have a freind who always does this- mails me cards and such with 6-20 stamps of different amounts. Kind of weird and kind of fun.