OT: 2D Barcodes on Junk Mail

Huh? if "they" already knew your bank balance, who are they secretly encoding it for?

You don't get it, do you? This is exactly the sort of thing that is ripe for abuse.

Some idiot in the mail dept will probably grab fields out of database somewhere and pop them into the 2D postage barcode. And for what possible reason? There is no reason for the 2D barcode to be on the mailpiece in the first place!!

Doesn't have to be a bank, though that was the example I used. Maybe it's your Visa statement, or your medical bills, or your retirement / trust fund records, or your school grades. Do they really need to encode ANY of this information in the postage cancellation??

I'm not saying they do (but I'll bet it has happened and nobody noticed!). But other than "Postage paid. Permit # XYZ" and maybe the dollar amount, what else is needed. (And even that isn't "needed" because the Post Office pays no attention to it whatsoever.)

You know, I guess another thing that bothers me is they want the City & State on the mailpiece, when the zip code has this info encoded already.

Why print: "Howey in the Hills, FL" when "34737" will do the job? Why both?

Oops. I meant to say DataMatrix, not PDF417, but you get the idea.

I downloaded a Shareware decoder, and of the several junk mail pieces I decoded, most of them simply encode the Return Address, but there doesn't appear to be any sort of standardization going on. Most also have some jumble of seemingly random characters, which I presume mean something only to the mailer. Or maybe their service if they farm it out. (That might actually make sense, now that I think about it...)

-mpm

Maybe genetic? How about your parents...

could it be that the poststal service scan it to identify the sender and use it to count how big a bill to send?

-Lasse

Sadly Peter, my father wasn't the brightest bulb on the block. But he did love us very much. Luckily, it skips a generation. I can almost assure you my I.Q. is significantly higher than your own, and in any event, high enough.

-mpm

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I thought about that too, but on Pre-sorted First class mail, the postage is collected at the time of mailing. There is no Invoice. For very large mailings, they just charge by the pound.. (tons)? They don't even bother to count the envelopes.

Generally, because they think they already know everything.

Cheers! Rich

You're sure they're not just digital postage (Information-Based Indicia, as the post office calls them)? They use a datamatrix symbol encoding a bunch of information and a digital signature. It's basically just a more complex postage meter though.

This PDF is a draft of the spec, but it lists the data fields in the barcode. Does it match what you scanned from your mail?

--
   Wim Lewis , Seattle, WA, USA. PGP keyID 27F772C1

Useless and meaningless? You would be amazed at how many people can't type the same thing twice. Even if they do, quite often it's still wrong. Then you have somone waiting for infromation, a price quote, or appointment and no way to contact them.

I have a simple text file listing all that inforamtion, and simply copy it & paste it twice. A couple clicks, and no errors.

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Sporadic E is the Earth\'s aluminum foil beanie for the \'global warming\'
sheep.

Talk about useless and meaningless *REQUIRED* duplication, may i refer you to the many online forms that require a "verification" of one's e-mail?

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riter...

27F772C1

That explains it! Thanks!! Not a perfect match, but close enough.

I think it also explains why I only see this on high-volume junk mail. (?)

OK, you know everything. Businesses never get bad information from potential customers. They never try to use snipped-for-privacy@none.com, or other obvious fake input, either.

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Sporadic E is the Earth\'s aluminum foil beanie for the \'global warming\'
sheep.

Most of these stupidites are on forms where one is requesting information. One would think that a requester knows their own e-mail address and if reasonably desirous of an answer, that they would enter their e-mail correctly. If not, then tough tissue paper. A "second", MANDATED request just compounds the stupidity that you allude to ("never end a sentence a preposition with").

uesting

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The problem is that validating an email in software is actually not that trivial. Obviously, you can check for ANY entry, that's easy. If the field is left blank, the Server (or local script) can alert the user. No big deal.

But once you get past that, it becomes a little tricky. Some characters are invalid in email addresses, so you have to trap for those. An email must contain a single "@" sign, and at least 1 dot (and possibily more), but not two adjacent dots. It must also end in a valid suffix, like "com", "net", "us, "biz", etc.... And more are being added all the time, so you would have to keep adjusting your server or script code to handle that possibility. Finally, the email address can contain no whitespaces, such as tabs, spaces, etc...

Then you have some characters which, while not prohibited in the address, can confuse the hell out of software (both server & client side, plus everything along the route.) These are characters like:

0x26H - "&" - which is a UNIX shell special character and must be URL encoded anyway. 0x27H - The apostrophe, (which might get lost in subsequently quoted text). 0x2AH - The "*" asterisk, which is often used as a wildcard 0x2CH - The comma, which is used to separate email addresses from each other 0x2FH - The forward slash

=2E..you get the idea, and if not, here's a listing and completel explaination of some of the potentially confusing aspects of these and other characters when used in an email address:

So, given all of this, it's often easier (in software - either server side or local script) to just ask the respondant to enter their email address information twice and do a simple string comparison. If either field is missing, or if the two fields don't match - that's usually good enough to flag as an error.

Mike is absolutely right. We collect info from our customers all the time. We often get bad info on forms. You would be amazed how many people use a URL for a valid email address, for example. (Some folks evidently don't know the difference!)

-mpm