Effective January 4, 2010, the Postal Service™ is revising Mailing Standards of the United States Postal Service, International Mail Manual (IMM®) sections 232.2 and 232.3 to authorize certain correspondence to be included in Priority Mail International® parcels. In the IMM’s Individual Country Listings, we are making appropriate revisions by deleting the references that indicate that personal correspondence in Priority Mail International parcels is not permitted. In each Individual Country Listing, these references appeared twice in the Priority Mail International section (in a note under the price table and in the “Flat Rate” section).
This revision is consistent with adopted Proposal 20.15.3 Rev. 1, amending Article 15 of the Universal Postal Union (UPU) Convention to authorize certain correspondence to be included in Priority Mail International parcels, including the Priority Mail International regular/medium and large flat-rate boxes.
In part, this resolution was adopted by UPU members in recognition that the current prohibition against enclosing correspondence in parcels is an inconvenience to many customers who want to send merchandise (particularly gifts) and also want to include some form of current greeting or note of congratulations for a special occasion. The same is true for a business that would like to enclose a brief note of gratitude for the customer’s business or some other business-related correspondence such as a personalized advertisement. Moreover, other regulations might require that parcels include some types of correspondence, such as invoices or statements of account (which can be viewed as current and personal correspondence). UPU members agreed that there is no longer a sound business reason to prevent such incidental enclosures.
In addition, this revision will allow businesses to use Priority Mail International service to ship documents having the character of personal correspondence (such as records or files) from one location to another, even when they are not exchanged between the sender and the addressee.
Note, though, that this revision does not permit the use of Priority Mail International parcels for sending letter-post items addressed to multiple addressees for local distribution, thereby preserving the existing prohibition against re-mail activities.
We will incorporate these revisions into the next printed version of the IMM and into the monthly update of the online IMM, which is available via Postal Explorer® at http://pe.usps.com.
— Mailing Standards, Pricing, 9-10-09
