The terms that decide what your drop costs and whether it lands.
Direct mail has its own dictionary — half USPS regulation, half production shorthand, all of it load-bearing. These are plain-English definitions of the postal, data, audience, and production terms we use across the platform, written without the marketing fluff. Each entry links to the feature it powers.
Postal
USPS-defined services, presort tiers, and tracking infrastructure that govern how mail moves and what it costs.
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NCOA
USPS National Change of Address — the 48-month registry of permanent move filings every mailing list must be processed against.
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CASS
Coding Accuracy Support System — the USPS certification that an address has been standardized to deliverable format.
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Intelligent Mail Barcode (IMb)
The 65-bar USPS barcode that carries routing, sender ID, and a piece-level serial number scanned at every sortation point.
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Pre-sort Local Entry
Sorting and dropping mail at the local USPS facility that serves the recipients to earn the deepest automation discount.
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Pre-sort Dropship
Trucking presorted mail to a destination USPS facility close to the recipients to skip USPS network transport and earn destination-entry discounts.
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Co-mingle
Combining mail from many senders into a single presorted pool to qualify small drops for the same automation discounts as large ones.
Production
The signature DirectMail.io capability that turns a USPS sortation scan into a triggered marketing event.
Audience
Identity infrastructure that resolves anonymous web visitors to mailable postal addresses.
See it run on your list.
Every term in this glossary corresponds to something the platform actually does. Bring a real campaign and a sample list — we’ll walk it through end to end in a single 30-minute demo.