Postzegelcode

For all mail except the first, the same thing that happens if you send a letter with no postage: the sender will receive a request to pay after delivery. If the sender is unknown the recipient will receive a request to pay (which can be appealed).

IIRC the first envelope scanned at a sorting facility invalidates the postzegelcode immediately, any envelopes using it after that will be handled like they had no postzegel at all (receiver has to pay)

In my experience it will be delivered and the sender will be politely asked to pay for it. They don't have to pay for it but it's rude not to.

The typical outgoing mail box, where you put your mail in for it to be delivered, doesn't allow peering into it. So a physical measure to avoid that. But if it's out in the open: first come first serve, like the other comments describe

Only the first one would be legal and the recipients would have to pay for the postal cost of the next one. If you put the origin (postal code plus home number is enough) on the back you get a payment proposal in your mailbox.

I would guess that the system generates more digits - lets say 3

when the postal system checks that PZC on the mail, if there is nothing written by the PZC then it's assumed to be fresh, and the 3 extra digits are looked up via a postal-service-only gateway, then placed on the mail by the PZC for future lookups, possibly along with a date.

If the PZC has the extra digits, then it can be looked up and confirmed as redeemed with those extra digits, and possibly the stamped date.

The extra digits could be stamped or handwritten, possibly with the postmark date used as the redemption date manually entered from the mail as it passes through the sorting system the first time, OR stamped from the date it's registered as redemption, either would work.

Such a system would relatively guarantee that fraud would be difficult, since only one person could have a PZC without the check digits go into the system, and sharing would be useless.

When we started our own parcel service in 2015 we thought that everything that is needed on the actual parcel is the unique ID of the parcel (generated by a system reminiscent of twitter's snowflake and intentionally printed with digits shuffled around as to increase the chance of the prefix being unique). Pretty quickly we found out that various operational concerns need additional data on the label, with routing info (for manual pre-sorting on the depots) and recipients phone number (the courier locates the parcel in the trunk by that) being pretty important.

Also, cool design of the label is one thing, but on both laser and thermal printers the resolution repeatability is much better in the direction perpendicular to the paper travel, so you do not want to do cute design things with vertical barcodes. And you want to have a huge margin below the barcode if it is aligned to the bottom of the label as some printers will occasionally get misaligned and part of the barcode will get on the next label… and the imaging scanners in Zebra terminals will happily read half a milimetre high code-128 barcode instead of the correct one on the bottom of the label.

Or, you know, the mail man?

If mail gets lost for longer than 5 days, it won’t be known who it goes to, since these codes are reused.

If the delivery model can’t survive an apocalypse, collapse of civilisation, or interruption to the rule of law/network connectivity, then you have no business running a postal service.

Not sure about NL, but in Switzerland you can buy those codes with an SMS. I guess many people want to do it quickly, and they might have already written the address of the recipient. So just getting a code it much faster, you don't have to enter the address somewhere.

For me too.

I used to have a sheet of stamps lying around. Often only one was used. Then those would "expire" after years, in the sense that (yearly?) tariff-increasments would invalidate the "now too cheap" ones. I then had to buy additional special ones to compensate for the price.

Digital is the way forward and this is a perfect example of simple digital to analog. It works fantastic.

Ok now I get it. Somehow despite all the detail the Wikipedia article doesn't seem to capture the point of it.

This does lead me to wonder what happens when something gets held up and it's an older code (sir) but it checks out.

Very true. Most of all because stamps required value for a letter change often and I always ended up with lots of old stamps which were not enough for a letter anymore, had to buy lots of stamps with very little value to complete, it was anarchy.

(2012, 2016, 2019 and 2022 saw price increases for German post for example…)

Insta-hire to the candidate that realizes the number of requests is so small that a plain-text file would suffice.

It is only purchasable if you install their software, can't just buy such a stamp on the website if I'm reading the page correctly?

I seem to remember Deutsche Post also had a thing you could just write on the letter, or maybe it was DHL's parcel service instead. Those were purchased simply online like any other product/service and, after paying, it told you what to write in the corner. Or maybe I misremember and they only have this system where you can take the pdf to a parcel shop and have them print your label.

Edit: found the "print in store" option, it's not for letters but for parcels https://www.dhl.de/de/privatkunden/pakete-versenden/angebot-... "Don't have a printer? Let your stamp be printed at [places]."

This is convenient. Do you know if sender tracking is available for these purchases? I tried getting one, but there was no sendungsnummer provided...

Denmark has had this for years. The code is 3 lines, each with 4 alfadigits. The code is valid for 180 days.

Same here in Norway.

Cool, I didn't know that. I still have a few self-printed QR code-type stamps. #PORTO is a nice option.

It used to be also a squared code consisting of 12 digits, you could receive via SMS to 22122, but this method is deprecated or already even terminated. Has anybody tested it recently?

https://www.giga.de/tipp/briefmarke-per-sms-an-22122-erhalte...

In the case of sloppy writing, the letter will be ejected from the sorting machine and reviewed by a human (same process as for illegible addresses).

If a human cannot find a match then the sender will receive a request to pay for the missing postage (presuming the code is invalid). If the sender is unknown the recipient will receive a payment request (which can be appealed).

Speaking from experience you would normally want the letter to arrive at its destination so I take care to write the code very clearly. I imagine this is true for most people.

Since there is already a framework for returning letters with invalid/unreadable/damaged addresses, I'd guess the overhead of returning wrongly-written postzegelcodes is negligible.

A well-formed, hand-written O is indistinguishable from a well-formed, hand-written zero. Literally, no amount of effort will make it clear which one is intended, short of some agreed-upon convention to use a different glyph like a slashed O for zero.

This is not true of G and 6 or B and 8. If these are well-formed, they are completely distinct.

People who paid for their post code are motivated to write the code clearly, for fear of nondelivery; but no amount of motivation will fix 0 versus O.

The handwriting '1' looks like a 'L'.

It certainly does not. Rather, the lower case l is easily confused for the digit 1. This postzegelcode doesn't use lower case.

I don't see it mentioned that I is avoided because of 1. The likely reason is that Europeans don't write 1 just as a stick. It starts with an angled upstroke. That upstroke makes it possible to confuse the European 1 with an American 7; but the European 7 has a horizontal stroke across its stem which thwarts that problem. (I addition, a cursive 7's upper horizontal stroke is actually wavy, like a tilde.) Confusion of I, 1 and 7 in European handwriting is next to nil.

Maybe it's not for technical reasons. It would be easy technically to have them be interchangeable. But someone who just purchased a stamp, and got one with a 0 or an 0, might worry about it not being delivered because their 0 might be mistaken for an 0. So maybe it's just nice UX? Just a guess.

I found an article about it:

https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2022/1012/1328565-digital-s...

Yeah, I got a flyer about it in the post recently.

Seems like a great idea, I seldom post anything, but when I do it's a pain to have to go buy stamps.

It's a bit stingy though that they are charging so much more for a digital stamp.

PS: Are those tiny, cheap, desktop laser engravers powerful enough to "print" on paper without starting a fire?

Yes, you can modulate their power. It usually takes a few experiments if the manual doesn't have a material table.

It sounds like the opposite of Forever Stamps.

Maybe Ephemeral Stamps? Momentary Stamps? Whatever Stamps?

I found an article[1] from before it was launched. Translated:

The most important reason for the introduction of the Zegelcode is that about 20% of our customers indicates they don't have a stamp on hand when they want to send something.

[1]: https://www.internetkassa.nu/postnl-verwacht-digitaal-franke...