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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DPV
Delivery Point Validation — the USPS-licensed verification that each address resolves to an active delivery point at the unit level, not just that the street and ZIP exist.
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DSF2
Delivery Sequence File, 2nd Generation — USPS-licensed enrichment that supplies walk-sequence order, accurate residential/business flags, drop counts, and seasonal indicators per address.
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LACSLink
Locatable Address Conversion System Link — the USPS-licensed service that converts rural-route, renumbered, and re-addressed records to their current city-style equivalents.
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mail.dat
The structured manifest format USPS commercial mailers submit to PostalOne! to document every piece, container, pallet, IMb, and sortation tier in a drop.
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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.