http://www.howtovanish.com/2009/07/careful-with-a-return-address/ Learn how to protect your personal and financial privacy. Mon, 06 Feb 2012 07:54:41 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= http://www.howtovanish.com/2009/07/careful-with-a-return-address/comment-page-1/#comment-309 Roger Thu, 01 Jul 2010 08:11:52 +0000 http://www.howtovanish.com/?p=147#comment-309 As an engineer who worked in the development and manufacture of the so called letter reading systems, I can add that the vast majority of letters is not photographed but simply scanned with high-speed OCR that will read the destination address to create the barcode tag in the front. ONLY the letter the OCR cannot read (mostly sloppily hand-written ones) are then photographed and its image sent hundreds of miles to reading stations where a human will read and type the address. The address read is then sent back and a barcode is printed in the letter. Pretty much in real time (some buffering), then the photos are discarded. Again, this happens to a only very small minority of the letters. The real-time OCR software is always being improved on to minimize this need and save costs. As an engineer who worked in the development and manufacture of the so called letter reading systems, I can add that the vast majority of letters is not photographed but simply scanned with high-speed OCR that will read the destination address to create the barcode tag in the front. ONLY the letter the OCR cannot read (mostly sloppily hand-written ones) are then photographed and its image sent hundreds of miles to reading stations where a human will read and type the address. The address read is then sent back and a barcode is printed in the letter. Pretty much in real time (some buffering), then the photos are discarded. Again, this happens to a only very small minority of the letters. The real-time OCR software is always being improved on to minimize this need and save costs.

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