My roommate once told me that the orange lines on the back of my envelopes, little parallel dashes that look like: l l l l l l l l l l l l, only they’re orange, they are a sign my mail is being monitored. I don’t believe him, simply because that would make it painfully obvious to anyone suspicious of their federal government. So, if not that, then what is it? Any postal workers in the house? Thanks for the tips.
I think it’s a sort of bar code printed in magnetic ink and carries routing information for the automated sorting machines to read.
(In the UK, it’s a little line of blue dots on the face of the envelope - that’s what I’m basing the above guess on, so I may be wrong).
This is from the United States Postal Service
web site at http://www.usps.com/news/2001/press/pr01_002.htm
“The The Integrated Data Systems (IDS)
was originally developed and deployed in 1998 to collect bar code data for two programs. The first, Identification Code Tracking, tracks letter mail through the automated distribution system,
where IDS collects information from several kinds of bar codes.
One is the orange Identification Code placed on the back of letters for Remote ZIP Encoding.
Similar to a license tag, the unique code identifies individual mail pieces and is applied to letter mail when high-speed sorters cannot correctly read address image information necessary to apply barcodes. In this case, the physical mailpiece bearing the orange bar code on the back remains at the mail processing center. The scanned address image is “e-mailed” off-site to a
Remote Encoding Center where human operators read the scanned image, key in the correct ZIP Code information, and then “e-mail” the data back to the mail processing plant. There the correct barcode is matched to the physical envelope bearing the unique orange license tag so the mail piece can continue automated processing.”