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:
“Along with them
They brought one Pinch, a hungry lean-faced villain,
A mere anatomy, a mountebank,
A threadbare juggler and a fortune-teller,
A needy, hollow-eyed, sharp looking wretch,
A living dead man.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“A letter from home is worth ten thousand ounces of gold.”
—Chinese proverb.
“So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can’t even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and, vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.”
—Russell Baker (b. 1925)