Here’s a broad question that maybe our post office dopers could answer.
I assume that if you forget to put postage on your mail that the post office will deliver it back to the return address.
With that in mind what are the answers to these questions:
How far will it be returned to me? If I live in Chicago and drop a letter in a Milwaukee mail box without postage, will it make it’s way back to me?
If not, is it only local? Say in your immediate zipcode?
If this is the case and let’s say I lived in a small one zipcode town, if I dumped a bunch of wedding invitations in the mail without postage and reversed the sending address and return address, would they all get to the guests postage free?
And finally, if I someone attempted something like this would it be illegal and considered mail fraud?
We’ve had threads on this topic before, but not recently I believe.
I suspect if you dropped one, it might be just fine. If you dropped a lot of them, bells would go off and they wouldn’t be delivered. You’d probably be investigated for some sort of crime, but I don’t know if it would be mail fraud, theft of services, or what. I tried a search on the USPS page (http://www.usps.com) but didn’t come up with anything.
I can’t speak for the USPS but in the UK what would happen is if there was just one a card would be delivered to the intended recipient stating that an item of mail was being held at the sorting office, they would then have the following options
Go pick it up, payment of postage and surcharge charged.
Affix correct postage to card + surcharge fee and mail it back
Ignore it in which case the item would be sent back to the sender after 7 days.
If there was a whole bunch of them they would simply be returned to the sender marked “Insufficient Postage”