Question On Use Of "Old" Stamps For Current Mailings......

Hi,
I may have this in the wrong category, but I did look for a more suitable one and couldn't decide on any other........

I've got a lot panes of unused stamps from the 80s and 90s and decided I would use them for my everyday mailings of bills and such. In example, I'll put a 33 cent with three 5 cents and a 1 or 2 cent which would equal $0.49 or $0.50 per.

I of course assume this is fine legally, but does it cause the post office to process them manually or somehow delay the process?

I've noticed that the mailing times SEEMS to be a day or two longer than usual, and I actually have one letter (Verizon payment) that is missing.

Am I giving the Post Office more work, or ???

There should not be any additional delay to your letters. The stamps from that era have the same phosphor for the PO sorting and cancelling machinery to detect as current stamps. It is unlikely that any person looks closely at the stamps anywhere in the process.

I use them all the time with no problems. The reason I started collecting is seeing mail with old stamps being used. I like to think each letter I mail like that has the possibility getting into the hands of the 2017 version of me at 12 years old...

"Correlation is not causation." IOW, the slowdown you perceive since using older stamps may be a coincidence. The missing payment has to be irritating. We've had problems on our route with mail being placed in the wrong mailboxes, such as me getting the mail to my neighbor on the right, and my neighbor on the left getting my mail. Who knows how far up and down the road that went? Mail gets "lost" all the time.

ekbustad is correct. The phosphor reading sensors on the equipment today have very few problems reading the stamps of the 1980s-90s. Today, mail is more likely to be delayed by mail being back-up in processing, due to machines being down or employees being absent. The other possibility is a mail sack not be fully emptied at a processing center or a mail sack found missed-in-processing on a tractor trailer at a BMC (Bulk Mail Center) or SCF (Sectional Center Facility). Any of these factors and lead to multiple day delays in mail processing and delivery. They are very common occurrences.

Hal,

Do you have an opinion regarding older postage that pre-dates phosphor tagging? Does that cause mail to be handled any differently that might cause a delay? I'll bet that such older postage is used almost exclusively by philatelists, but I'm still curious about this.

TIA.

Basil

it is still fine as long as at least one stamp used on the mauling is tagged, if all are untagged it could get kicked out for manual inspection

My post office considered it a mauling.

I use them all the time, in massive quantity. My firm sends mass mailings, and I find that useing 'odd' stamps gets us noticed!

I love receiving a package with older stamps on them. Occasionally there is even one that has not yet been placed in my US collection. However - an even better scenario is purchasing an E whatever mint lot for less than face value and using them for my mailings. My Scottish heritage loves that.

I don't know if my experience differs from others on this forum but although I receive a lot of mail, these days it would be the very rare occurrence that I would receive any letter or package with anything other than a meter or common definitive. I can't remember the last time I saw a commemorative and I am an active collector on the lookout for such items to add a used example of a recent stamp. Of course I am guilty of this practice as well as it is easier for me to get forever stamps from the automated post office at hours prior to the PO opening up. I would guess that most of us have not seen 90% of non definitive US stamps issued over the last 10 years on a piece of mail---raising the question for example as to how many of the 7000 or so issues released by USSR/Russia the average Doviet citizen has ever seen in his/her lifetime?

My wife loves old postage and when I come across US stamps that are worth more as postage than they are on ebay I give them to her for her mail. She uses it on everything but our ebay sales because we have to use the labels. She always has a folder with a $100-200 postage in it. Her favorite postage is the 1992 Voyage of Columbus S/S which look great on our mail.

As an aside our home in FL took a direct hit from Irma and got flooded. During the clean up I found her folder of stamps on a high shelf. The loose postage was stuck together and may or may not be salvageable. The stamps in glassines survived much better and had minor sticking but the Columbus SS in their original envelopes were completely unaffected.

Because it is so rare, it is worth my time to scour ebay for lot of old stamp to use on mailings. Make my letters stand out. (also save on postage, but not enough to compensate for the time involved)

Making a mailed item 'stand out' can be either good or bad.

A discussion only considering tagged or non-tagged stamps seems to ignore the use of preprinted, barcoded labels. For whatever reason(s), my informal tracking shows that to and from my location mail with pre-printed labels moves through faster than mail which uses only stamps. I acknowledge that 'mileage may vary', others may have different experiences.

Additionally, there are other time savings to be gleaned for not using old stamps, printing postage labels saves time over scrounging around for the proper combination of stamps and it also allows for better accounting of monthly postage costs.

People also get weary of spending time and effort to use stamps only to have many of them ruined by 'marker monkeys'.

I still indeed use stamp on much of my mail; Lord knows I have enough stamps to never buy any postage the rest of my life. Heck, I even put early 1900s Christmas Seals on my Christmas cards each year.

But I hold nothing against anyone who chooses the much more efficient, and possibly faster, preprinted/barcoded labels.
Don

When you present an item at the Post Office that has $2.85 postage made up of 6c, 10c & 13c stamps it slows things down. Multiple that by 40 items and I have to use labels