In a win for the direct marketing industry, the U.S. Postal Service last week modified its Commercial Mail Receiving Agency (CMRA) rules to permit the use of either the letters “PMB” or the number sign in the address block for mail that’s sent to private mailbox customers.
The modified rule which went into effect last Wednesday ends more than a year of wrangling between postal officials and the private mailbox and direct marketing industries over the addressing of mail for CMRA customers.
The decision by postal officials was hailed by Gene Del Polito, Association for Postal Commerce president, and Richard A. Barton, the Direct Marketing Association’s senior vice president, Congressional Matters, and Postal Watch, the private mailbox industry’s trade association.
They noted that many direct marketers, mass mailers and mail monitoring companies use CMRA’s to ensure that their mailing lists are not being pirated or misused. In addition, such use allows marketers to check on the timely delivery of their mailings by the USPS.
“The rule was a long time in coming and we’re just glad that the USPS was not persuaded by the efforts of some to over-regulate private mailbox companies,” Del Polito said, referring to a campaign by more than half of the nation’s 50 state attorneys general for tighter controls on private mailbox operators.
There was no immediate comment on the rule change by either the USPS Inspection Service or the attorneys general, all of whom argued that mandatory use of the letters PMB would help combat mail fraud.
“This decision should resolve most, if not all of the problems connected with the industry’s use of private mailbox companies for list security purposes,” Barton added.
Rick Merritt, Postal Watch’s executive director, called the postal service action “a major victory” for the private mailbox industry saying it was “the latest in a long line of concessions and modification the USPS has reluctantly made to the regulations during the past year.”
Chief among those concessions was the dropping of a proposal by postal officials that would have required CMRA’s to provide them with a host of personal information about their customers.
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