Back to Intelisent.com
Postal Affairs Blog

his just came over from the Help Desk.  As if the PostalOne! woes weren’t bad enough for the Postal Service, weather issues in both Washington DC and Memphis certainly aren’t helping things:

“Due to Inclement weather at our Memphis Help Desk location, please be advised that we will begin our after hours operations at 5:00 pm (CT) today.  The PostalOne! email account will continue to be monitored during normal business hours, but the help desk phones cannot be staffed.

To ensure your issues are received, please submit your questions or problems via email to the PostalOne Help Desk at PostalOne@usps.gov.  This is the recommended method of contacting the Help Desk for support during normal business hours today.  If you do not have email ability please call the Help Desk and select the “After Hours” option.  Limitations of the “After Hours’ options may result in a slower response time, however all calls will be handled as quickly as possible.

Normal after hours operations will resume at 7:00 pm (CT) today.

The PostalOne! system has been down since 5:50 pm ET Friday. Due to the complexity of restoration activities it is projected that the system will be back up Tuesday evening, Feb. 9.”

Official word from the PostalOne! Help Desk this morning.  I will be attending the 10am briefing and will report back after that.

“Attention PostalOne!® Users!

The PostalOne! system has been down since 5:50 pm ET Friday Feb. 5 and is projected to be back up late evening on Tuesday Feb. 9. During this outage mailers cannot access mailing reports, balance, fees and transaction information. Mailers cannot submit electronic mailing information or receive Full Service feedback such as address correction information. Although the FAST system is operational only the online FAST application is available to schedule appointments.

USPS acceptance facilities are operating under contingency procedures. The attached describes the procedures mailers should follow to submit mailings via postal acceptance units.

We are conducting two webinars on Monday Feb. 8 at 10:00 EST and 2:00 EST to advise mailers of our contingency procedures and respond to questions/concerns. The access information for the two webinars is below:

10:00 EST: Webinar on PostalOne! outage and Contingency Procedures

When: Monday, February 08, 2010 10:00 AM-11:00 AM (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada).

NOTE: You can attend only 30 minutes prior to the meeting start time.

TO ATTEND WITH AUDIO ONLY:

From a phone, dial:

Phone Number(s):877-512-0764
Meeting ID:4353222

TO ATTEND THE WEB CONFERENCE AND JOIN WITH AUDIO (No earlier than 30 minutes prior to the start):

Important: The link below can only be used to Attend your meetings.

1) Browse to: http://meetingplace5.usps.gov/join.asp?4353222
2) After the MeetingPlace window is open, click the Phone icon (under the Participant List or in the upper right-hand corner).
3) Click Connect Me, validate or update your phone number and click Connect Me again.
4) When the system calls you press 1 to join.

Support Information

Browse to the MeetingPlace Reference Center at http://meetingplace1.usps.gov/refcenter for more information including training material, meeting tips, and FAQs.

For MeetingPlace problems or issues, please contact the MeetingPlace Help Desk at 1-800-343-1796 or by email at mailto:usps@meetingplace.net

Visit http://meetingplace1.usps.gov/test/ to test your web browser for compatibility with MeetingPlace.

2:00 ET: 10:00 ET: Webinar on PostalOne! outage and Contingency Procedures

When: Monday, February 08, 2010 2:00 PM-3:00 PM (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada).

NOTE: You can attend only 30 minutes prior to the meeting start time.

TO ATTEND WITH AUDIO ONLY:

From a phone, dial:

Phone Number(s):877-512-0764
Meeting ID:6917773
Date/Time:Monday, February 08, 2010 @ 02:00PM US/Eastern
Meeting Password:.

TO ATTEND THE WEB CONFERENCE AND JOIN WITH AUDIO (No earlier than 30 minutes prior to the start):

Important: The link below can only be used to Attend your meetings.

1) Browse to: http://meetingplace5.usps.gov/join.asp?6917773
2) After the MeetingPlace window is open, click the Phone icon (under the Participant List or in the upper right-hand corner).
3) Click Connect Me, validate or update your phone number and click Connect Me again.
4) When the system calls you press 1 to join.

Support Information

Browse to the MeetingPlace Reference Center at http://meetingplace1.usps.gov/refcenter for more information including training material, meeting tips, and FAQs.

For MeetingPlace problems or issues, please contact the MeetingPlace Help Desk at 1-800-343-1796 or by email at mailto:usps@meetingplace.net

Visit http://meetingplace1.usps.gov/test/ to test your web browser for compatibility with MeetingPlace.

Feel free to contact your local Business Mail acceptance personnel or the PostalOne! Helpdesk at 800-522-9085 with your questions/concerns.

We apologize for the inconvenience. We are committed to restoring PostalOne! at the earliest and will advise you once the system is restored so you can resume your normal mailing procedures with the Postal Service.”

Although there has been no word from PostalOne!, there was a notice sent out by FAST that the systems will be down until TUESDAY at the EARLIEST.

At this point the system has been down almost two days, with a best-case-scenario projection of 5 days downtime.  This will cause major problems with the mailers who are relying on this system.  5 days of downtime is unacceptable.

From the PostalOne! help desk:

The USPS technical teams continue to recover the PostalOne database. This process is a lengthy process and not expected to complete until late Sunday, 2/7/2010.

USPS Headquarters Business Mail Acceptance has advised acceptance units to follow the business contingency plan for accepting mail during a PostalOne outage.

• For mailers who have been submitting electronic documentation (eDoc), you will required to submit hardcopy postage statements and qualification summary reports for your mailings during the outage.

• The hardcopy statements will be retained in the BMEU/DMU and will be used to validate against the eDoc submitted when the system is restored.

As a reminder, the outage is being tracked under the Priority Urgent Remedy Case #4276011.

An updated status will be provided at approximately Noon CT on 2/7/2010.

————–
Mailers will have to contend with completely switching from electronic to paper for an undetermined period of time.  Mail entry will be slowed down greatly as a result.  And had MTAC Work Group #122 not insisted that the USPS document a contingency plan, things would really be total chaos.

From the PostalOne Help Desk -

“The USPS technical teams are working round the clock to restore the PostalOne operating environment and recover the database. This process is a lengthy process and not expected to complete until late Sunday, 2/7/2010.

USPS Headquarters Business Mail Acceptance has advised acceptance units to follow the business contingency plan for accepting mail during a PostalOne outage. The outage is being tracked under the Priority Urgent Remedy Case # 4276011.

A status update will be provided at approximately 6PM CT”

——

I was waiting for the update to post, but it is an hour past 6pm Central and still no update.  Will add to this post when I hear something.

From the PostalOne Help desk this morning - at this time PostalOne has been down since yesterday afternoon:

“We continue to work this issue and at this point do not have an ETA for when system will be back online. The outage is impacting Postalone, MDR/Mail.dat, Mail.xml, and PostalOne/FAST Ops web service functionality.

We have determined that a critical disk error has occurred. This resulted in a PostalOne database failure. We are in the process of performing a database recovery. At this point we expect that recovery will take an extended amount of time. Sites should follow the business contingency plan during the outage. Once we have an ETA we will provide an update. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

I have posted the contingency plan documents here, as they are nowhere to be found at the USPS site or at RIBBS:
Contingency Plan
Contingency Mail Log

Attention PostalOne! Users

The PostalOne system is currently down. We have a team investigating now.

Updates will be provided as they are available. There is an open PRIORITY URGENT Remedy Case #: HD0000004276011.

USPS System Maintenance - This weekend many USPS systems will experience outages as part of a semi-annual software patching effort of all USPS midrange systems. This patching will start at 11PM CT on 2/6 and run through 10AM CT on 2/7. The following information provides additional detail on the specific timeframes for these systems:

eAdmin/Business Customer Gateway patching will occur between 11PM CT on 2/6 through 5AM CT on 2/7.
Customer Registrations/eCAP database patching to occur between 3AM CT and 4AM CT on 2/7.

PostalOne! will have an outage on Sunday, February 7 for both Production and TEM environments between 3:00AM CT through 10:00AM CT. There will be no access to PostalOne!, MDR, or the PostalOne/FAST Ops web service functionality during this maintenance window.

FAST online access will also be unavailable during the eAdmin, Business Customer Gateway, and
Customer Registration patching due to the dependency on these systems for logon/access.

Board of Governors meeting February 9

Key items include:
# Quarterly report on financial performance
# Inspector General Report on USPS Share of CSRS Pension Responsibility
# Quarterly report on service performance

Interesting to read the comments at many of the USPS employee sites regarding the “Do Not Obliterate” push, where USPS folks are being trained to keep the address block clear of cross-outs.  Here is a look at one of the training posters, courtesy of The Dead Tree Edition:
http://foxyurl.com/OCg
PARS=Postal Automated Redirection System
CFS=Computerized Forwarding System

Many of the comments center around loop mail, and the problem of mail getting incorrectly routed over and over by the automated equipment:

“If we don’t cross out the bar code, how do we get CFS to stop returning the same piece of mail over and over again. If a letter has a forwarding address written on the letter and there is still a barcode present, the plant will send it to the barcode address everytime. Loop mail has been the only successful alternative to CFS miscues but if we start sending all our IMb mail to circumvent the automation, the bar code still will not be read. Still confused..”

“the “Do not obliterate” directive has been out without giving any alternate routing instructions…any postal worker can tell you that loop mail is legion & almost impossible to get correctly routed. What if IMb mail is incorrectly addressed, but the correction is not in the system?”

“Anyone remember “LOOP” Mail? This is the cause. Mail with bad addresses is sent back to the plant. Even though the tray is labeled “Manual” some management says ‘run it through the DBCS anyway’. End result - The DBCS reads the bad address and re-send the letter back to the same carrier and the process begins anew. The mail is “looped” around in the system until someone finally pulls it out of the automated mailstream!”

Not crossing out bar codes has been a standard operating procedure for many years.
However, postal sorting machines direct mail to its destination by reading the bar code.
When the same miscoded letter keeps coming back to the carrier day after day, thee is little choice but to line out the barcode with the hope that it will then be sent to its correct destination.
There is supposed to be a “loop mail” process to redirect mis barcoded mail, but it often fails as the miscoded letters get worked right back into the regular mail stream.”

Please comment on how prevalent “loop” mail is, and what could be done to help remedy the situation.  Should there be a different process for redirecting this mail?