My mail is deluged with worthless credit card solicitations and pleas for donations, all bearing telltale stamps of odd denomination: “Tractor 7.1 cents nonprofit,” “Oilwagon 10.1 cents bulk rate,” “Railroad Mail Car 21 cents presorted,” etc. These stamps are almost never cancelled. Can I reuse them for my own (nobler) epistles, provided they add up to 29 cents? –Gary Schwartz, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
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Not legally, as you probably guessed. The whole point of such stamps is that they don’t require cancellation. Eliminating a step in handling saves the postal service money, which it passes along to mailers in the form of rate discounts. Thus the odd denominations. Skipping the stamp altogether and printing bulk-rate-postage-paid marks (“indicia”) on the envelopes theoretically saves the senders even more money (no labor to stick stamps), but some bulk mailers prefer stamped letters on the theory that they’re less likely to get thrown away unread.
Most mail without proper postage is simply returned. If you cheated in quantity and conspicuously encouraged your friends to do the same, the feds might decide to charge you with conspiracy and fraud. But the real deterrent is that most people have what’s known as a life. You’d have to be pretty desperate for entertainment to take any deep satisfaction in cheating the government out of 29 cents.
