The United States Postal Service started a dead letter office in 1825 to deal with undeliverable mail. In 2006 approximately 90 million undeliverable-as-addressed (UAA) items ended up in this office; where the rightful owners cannot be identified, the correspondence is destroyed to protect customer privacy, and enclosed items of value are removed. Items of value that cannot be returned are sold at auction, except for pornography and firearms. The auctions also occasionally include items seized by postal inspectors and property being retired from postal service.
These facilities are now known as mail recovery centers (MRC). Other former names include dead letter branch and dead parcel branch. These facilities are not unique to the US Postal Service, and go by different names in other countries. The USPS mail recovery centers are located in Atlanta, Georgia and Saint Paul, Minnesota. An MRC in San Francisco, California was closed on September 13, 2002. Since 2004, the postal auctions have been held only in Atlanta. These auctions include not only material lost in the U.S. but also material from other national postal authorities who consign them to the USPS for auction.
The Canadian equivalent, the Undeliverable Mail Office (NUMO) located in Mississauga, Ontario.
In the UK, undeliverable mail without an external address are processed in National Returns Centre, located in Belfast.
Read more about Dead Letter Office: In Culture
Famous quotes containing the words dead, letter and/or office:
“If I be foiled, there is but one shamed that was never
gracious; if killed, but one dead that is willing to be so.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“I consider, then, the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one state, incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas.... But they have no slow, big ideas. And the fewer consoling, noble, shining, free, jovial, magnanimous ideas that come, the more nervously and desperately they rush and run from office to office and up and downstairs, thinking by action at last to make life have some warmth and meaning.”
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)