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Comment by credit_guy | Hacker News Reader

I call shenanigans. There is a bar code on the bottom part of the postcard. It has 65 bars. This is consistent with the Intelligent Mail Barcode that was introduced in 2013. Prior to that there were different barcode standards, Postnet and Planet, but neither had 65 bars, the highest number of bars that Postnet had was 62, and they were short and long only. This barcode here has 4 types of bars: short, long up, long down, and long up-and-down; again this is consistent with the IMB code.

By the way, barcodes were introduced to encode ZIP codes, and ZIP codes were introduced in 1963.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Mail_barcode

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> We did reach out to the post office for comment and a spokesperson told me, “In most cases these incidents do not involve mail that had been lost in our network and later found. What we typically find is that old letters and postcards – sometimes purchased at flea markets, antique shops and even online – are re-entered into our system. The end result is what we do best – as long as there is a deliverable address and postage, the card or letter gets delivered.”

A bit of a sensationalized headline. Just an old postcard, the postmark is recent.

Post office says postmark is from 1920 the age and legitimacy of the origin of the card is correct. It was lost in 1920 in the mail or it was received kept for so long that it ended up being antique postcard that went through storefront market resold to somebody in modern times And they placed it in the mailbox.

> sensationalized headline

No, the postmark is 1920 according to the article.

See https://i.imgur.com/r8HqDc2.png

I see two postmarks. One stamped from 1920, and a second one sprayed on from 2020 (just to the left of the first one).

The second postmark suggests that this was possibly redeposited into the mail somewhere.

Can it not have multiple postmarks? The stamp at the top (which says 1920) and the modern barcode underneath?

The barcode is not a postmark, it's a machine readable version of the address

Nerdy nitpick: It might not be quite an "address". In the UK at least the machine readable information (either added during sorting or printed deliberately for a discount rate by bulk senders) indicates a delivery point a place to which this post will be in fact delivered, distinct from an address.

For example my address says Flat 7 of 60 My Street, and a friend lives at Flat 10 of 74 My Street. But my delivery point is a letter box in the front door of my home, whereas his delivery point is just a locked box at street level. Timed locks allow the postman to enter my building despite not having a key, so as to deliver post to my front door, whereas his building doesn't do this.

The company (almost everything in the UK is privatised because Tory ideology says this is a good idea even if it clearly isn't) delivering post owns very detailed maps of where all these delivery points are, because of course it needs its employees to visit all those points to deliver post, whereas it needn't care where in some sense an "address" is other than where the post is to be delivered.

Address (n): "a place where a person or organization may be communicated with"

Mmm. Where did you find that definition?

My (Collins) paper dictionary offers:

"The conventional form by which the location of a building is described" and nothing close to what you've suggested.

Wiktionary offers: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/address

"A description of the location of a property, usually with at least [...]"

Merriam-Webster:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/address

There are no shenanigans here.

The remote barcoding system is used for hand written addresses and the post office adds them.

Typically when someone uses Inteligent Mail Barcode, they mechanize the address too. And if you are going for a spoof, you wouldn’t encode an IMB if you are hand writing the address.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_Bar_Coding_System

Exactly. The barcode is added in the sorting facility, not at the post office and not by the sender.

I regularly get USPS notices of delivery at my house, where packages, according to the USPS delivery tracker, were "left in or around the mail box" or were "given directly to a resident" but they don't actually show up for hours or until sometime in the next few days.

It is far from inconceivable for a postcard to be lost in USPS-land and then years-later complete its journey, getting a bar code affixed. This would not be the first time this has happened. Other times, entire bags of sorted mail were lost and recovered decades later and then delivered.

The barcode is printed on the postcard in the sorting facilities after the recipient’s address has been read.

If the mail got lost on its way to the sorting facility, it was probably never stamped and therefore just had to be thrown into a mailbox again.

The barcode would have been printed this year when the postcard was processed in the sorting facility.

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