Metro Mailing & Printing

Starting on Nov. 23, 2008, the postal service put into effect a requirement that all automated presorted mailings follow guidelines to incorporate recent address changes. The move is meant to avoid the circulation of massive amounts of undeliverable mail which tends to clog the postal system. The postal service offers several options for customers to become compliant with these requirements and receive automation discounts on their mailings. Some of these include:

• Ancillary Service Endorsements (Such as “Address Service Requested”) which may charge you a fee for returning mail back to you
• Adding “Or Current Resident” on each label, which makes the piece less personal and does not inform you if your intended contact has moved
• NCOA Link Processing, which matches address changes against the national database and enables you to correct your own data with updated addresses

At Metro, our certified software offers NCOA Link Processing at reasonable rates. A processed list (or subsets of it) can be used for up to 95 days. As a cost-saving measure, we return a list of changed addresses back to the customer so the customer’s internal database can be updated. The customer can then send us new sublists from this updated database for 95 days after processing before recertification is needed.

A summary of Move Update can be found here.

A discussion of the NCOA Link process can be found here.

Certain database format requirements must be met in order for your list to process through NCOA Link. Please contact us at Metro to learn how our NCOA Link Processing can make you automation compliant and also help keep your databases current.

PDF has gained momentum over the past few years as the file of choice for reliable transfer of fonts and layout. Office software such as Word and Publisher are notorious for being unreliable when going from one computer to another. Word will actually change fonts without warning when it encounters a missing font. Publisher tends to adopt the kerning, compression and font substitution values of the new computer, which may alter the layout without warning (cut-off/hidden type is a common Publisher issue when paragraphs break at the wrong spot and the article ends abruptly in mid-sentence).

PDFs tend to be the safest choice for sending basic black ink jobs to a colleague, customer–or the printer. If you create color jobs for full-color digital presses or copiers, PDFs still tend to be your best bet. The problem arises when you have large print run projects that have to be run on presses in “spot” colors to be cost-efficient. By default, Word and Publisher don’t handle spot colors well and PDFs created from these programs give erratic results when you try to separate spot colors.

If you are planning a project that makes use of a spot color (e.g., uses black and a blue ink) please contact us to discuss options which will make spot color printing reliable and cost-effective.

If you don’t have a PDF writing program, you can download cutePDF for free. This and other free programs don’t have quite the reliability of the true Adobe product, so be sure to compare the results to your original file.