And they’re probably the only people who could answer my specific questions. So I can’t give you a number.”īesides letter carriers, mail sorters, and clerks, the USPS employs people who deal specifically with junk mailĪfter another futile (and most likely annoying) attempt to get some sort of number from him beyond the 14.2 cents figure, Rizzo told me that the USPS actually employs a number of bulk mail specialists. There are very, very specific requirements on classes of mail, rates of mail…There are manuals on this stuff, so it’s just very, very difficult to answer in a manner that’s easy to reduce down to a sentence. Bean?”Ī: (Frustrated sigh) “I think somehow we’re not connecting. Q: “So is that like the letters insurance companies send out? And what’s the difference between what say, they would pay versus a catalog, like FingerHut or even L.L. Roughly comparable to First Class, one ounce size.” I can say…the most economical way of doing ad mail, it can be done with as little as 14.2 cents apiece, but that requires the customer to do more.”Ī: “That could be an 8×10 sheet of paper folded in half. Advertising mail comes in all shapes, sizes and forms.”Ī: “I want to stress once again…it’s very difficult to put a particular number on it because there are so many different categories of advertising mail. Those mailings are designed for mass mailings, so they’re more economical, and help drive the economy. Q: “So what is the standard rate for Standard mail?”Ī: “It’s less than the First-Class rate. And this led to an interesting pair of conversations between Tom Rizzo and me, the highlights of which are presented here: Given the average Rizzo cited, it’s clear the people who send us letters inviting us to change our insurance pay significantly less than the woman sending her grandson a graduation card. Whether it’s 1:2 or 1:3, ratios like that are the kinds of talking points that show up on an agency fact sheet. “While Advertising Mail takes up a larger percentage of mail today, it takes on average three pieces of mail to make up the contribution of a single piece of First-Class mail.”īut in 2010, the Postal Service found it was actually closer to a 1:2 ratio, with First-Class Mail bringing in $34 billion while mail termed “Advertising” brought in $17.3 billion. First-Class mail, you could be forgiven for believing that basically, Fingerhut’s all that’s keeping the Postal Service afloat. Seeing the sheer numbers for Standard vs. (I unofficially call this mix “the regular mail,” because I don’t get packages, certified letters, and flat-rate boxes sent to me everyday.) It’s more than half our mail -if you don’t count things like express delivery, media mail, parcel service, and some of the USPS’ more esoteric delivery options. So saying ad mail is, “an extremely important part of our mail mix” is something of an understatement. In particular, your file does indeed appear to be encoded using KOI-8 (determined based on the statement that the text is Cyrillic and the apparent distribution of actual characters), with the application apparently interpreting it as ISO-8859-1 or Windows codepage 1252(determined simply based on what is being displayed, plus the fact that these are standard fallback encodings for many devices).A world without junk mail might be less irritating in the short-term, but it could also mean a Postal Service in much worse shape eml, format it like an email message, make sure the Content-Type header specifies the correct encoding, and then open the resulting file in a good email client (pretty much anything except Outlook or Windows Mail) and copy the text out of there to a text editor and save it.įor future reference, the generally accepted method of avoiding this is to save files as either UTF-8 or UTF-16 (UTF-8 is usually preferred, as it's better supported by most platforms other than Windows than UTF-16). The standard fix is to use a transcoding tool, either online or offline (though I know of no free ones for Windows which work offline), or open the document in an application that lets you set the encoding and save it through that as the desired encoding.Īs a somewhat hacky alternative, if you can save the file without modifying the encoding, you can change the extension to. In short, the application you are opening the file with is using the wrong encoding to try and read the file. What you're seeing is referred to as mojibake.
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