# Postage Due - How does it work? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [December 11, 2012, 11:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/postage-due-how-does-it-work/643769 "2012-12-11T23:50:20Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![gnoitall](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/bb73d2/32.png) [@gnoitall](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gnoitall)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2012, 12:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/postage-due-how-does-it-work/643769/21 "2012-12-13T00:01:13Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > My sister-in-law’s father was a postman. He never bothered collecting it, just paid it out his own pocket. > > History: For some reason, not known to me, the original post office collected from the receiver, not the sender. But the receiver could refuse and the mail was, I think, then destroyed. But the receiver got to look at the envelope first and often the message was a color-coded reply or order or something. Finally, some genius at the post office decided to encourage pre-paid postage and halved the rate to encourage this. Forward 100 years or so and now pre-paid was the standard. Postage due was a throwback to the old system and you had to pay twice the missing postage. The [genius in question](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowland_Hill_(postal_reformer)#Postal_reform). The other big innovation in Hill’s postal reforms was uniform postage. Before that time, it was calculated at the post office by distance. Postmasters would, for each letter, have to look up the distance between origin and destination and annotate the postage due. That’s a lot of time and work. The “postage refused” dodge you mentioned (coded message on outside of envelope) meant that much of that effort was wasted calculating postage that would never be collected. ---
**Author:** ![Alan\_Smithee](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/2acd7d/32.png) [@Alan\_Smithee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alan_Smithee)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2012, 7:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/postage-due-how-does-it-work/643769/22 "2012-12-13T07:52:43Z")
> [@Bear\_Nenno](#): > > If I were you, the next time I mailed a letter I would put 45 cents extra postage on it. > [@Folly](#): > > I’ll go with your extra postage next time idea. These are jokes, right? If the letter carrier had to pay the 45¢ out of his pocket, 45¢ in stamps affixed to an envelope isn’t going to do him much good, is it? It doesn’t even really help the Post Office. No more than throwing the extra stamp in the trash, anyway. Even if they keep track of things like postage due letters and letters with overpostage, there’s no way they could connect the two in your case and figure out that you really did pay the postage due. ---
**Author:** ![Folly](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/folly/32/3219_2.png) [@Folly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Folly)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2012, 3:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/postage-due-how-does-it-work/643769/23 "2012-12-13T15:12:44Z")
> [@Alan\_Smithee](#): > > These are jokes, right? You picked up on these posts as jokes? Not the posts where I should spend 20-30 dollars worth of my own time to go to the post office to try to pay them the .45. Heh. ---
**Author:** ![Folly](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/folly/32/3219_2.png) [@Folly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Folly)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2012, 6:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/postage-due-how-does-it-work/643769/24 "2012-12-13T18:23:00Z")
I’ve been thinking about it a little more. We’ve only been here a couple of months and don’t know our mail carrier, but I’m going to tape an envelope to the mailbox with $10 and a Happy Holidays note. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/postage-due-how-does-it-work/643769.md?page=1)