On Tue, 30 Oct 2018, Chris Olson via CentOS wrote:
One of our summer interns has stayed on during the school year to work some weekends on special assignments. This past weekend, her assignment was to draft, and try out, procedures for scanning all incoming regular mail including the envelopes. This is a new effort for us because previous mail handling was done by another organization.
Most of our incoming mail is from other businesses that create printed address labels.? Many of these labels also have a type of bar code below the address.? Is there a Linux utility or standard application that will read and translate these codes.
Google for "Intelligent Mail Barcode" Here is one link: https://postalpro.usps.com/mailing/intelligent-mail-barcode but there are many others. IIRC the postal service even publishes the specs so you can build your own software.
Handling bulk mail is way more complex than most people realize. Decoding the Intelligent Mail Barcode is trivial but it might not be as useful as you think. It is mostly meant the USPS to route mail and to provide information to the sender about how much of their mail got delivered and what got returned.
For example, if you track your bulk mail that you send, and a piece gets returned you can simply scan the bar code and compare against your db to know what got returned without even opening the envelope.
HTH,