The Mailroom mail sorting rules come down to three questions at the desk. If the letter passes all three it is real mail and goes up in a capsule; if it fails any one of them it is junk and goes in the furnace. The directory book on your desk holds the written policy, and it is the authority on whether the person or department on an envelope exists.
The Mailroom mail sorting rules at your desk
- Is the letter addressed to a real person or a real department?
- Is the information inside the letter correct?
- Is it an advertisement?
Any no sends it to the furnace. All three yes sends it up in a capsule to the floor it belongs to.
The directory book also carries a page headed JUNK MAIL POLICY, which lists what has to be burned:
- Mail addressed to a department or a person that does not exist.
- Mail that looks like an advertisement.
- Mail from companies selling their services or goods.
- Mail from government agencies, especially tax collectors and law enforcement.
- Mail from bill collectors and collection agencies.
These same items are the fuel for the furnace, so a correct sort and a hot furnace come from the same decision — see furnace and machinery upkeep for what you can throw in and how to check the heat.
Inspecting an envelope
Inspecting a letter zooms the envelope in so you can read it properly before you commit it. Three parts of the envelope carry the information you need:
- The sender address.
- The recipient name, with the department printed under it.
- The company address the letter is going to.
The department under the name is what turns the letter into a floor. Cross-check both the name and the department against the directory, and if neither appears there, the letter does not exist for you and it is burned. The routing routine is in which floor to send mail to.
Letters that look suspicious
A warning scrawled across an envelope is not a sorting rule. Handwritten lines such as LOOK BEHIND YOU, HELP! and RUN! are part of the story, not part of the decision, so you handle a suspicious letter with the same routine as any other: inspect the envelope, check the recipient and the contents against the policy, and then route it or burn it. If the small print on the envelopes is hard to read, the readability option in the accessibility tab makes it easier — controls and settings shows where it is.
A department with no name, or a name with no department
A letter addressed only to a department is fine as long as that department appears in the directory, because the department alone gives you a floor to send it to. A letter addressed only to a name is not: with no department printed under it, there is no floor to route it to, and a name that cannot be matched to a department is a name that does not exist for you. Both are settled the same way, by looking the recipient up in the directory book — see which floor to send mail to.