Hello! Today we are going to discuss some mailing terms, what they mean, and why you need them. If any of you have ever done a bulk mailing you have probably heard the terms CASS and NCOA. You need both, and they both serve a great purpose to help save money and get your mail to the right destination.

Let's examine CASS first. CASS stands for Coding Accuracy Support System and is a program developed by the United States Postal Service (USPS) to improve the accuracy of mailings. What does this mean? Well, let us look at the main points of CASS:

Standardization

CASS cleans and standardizes address records, meaning it looks at your inputted address and corrects common misspellings, city names, and ZIP codes. So, if you input Raod, it corrects it to Road. CASS will use a valid Zip Code to update the City and State or use the valid City/State to update a missing Zip Code. It will however use the Zip Code first (so if it is wrong, the address could come back as undeliverable since it may not have a street in that Zip Code) As example, if you enter an address from Chicago and enter a Zip Code from California, it will use the California Zip Code, update the city/state, then look for a deliverable address there.

Address updates (LACS)

LACS (Locatable Address Conversion System) updates outdated addresses and checks against a database maintained by 911 Emergency Services. This database is being constantly updated as addresses are nationally standardized. This verifies the location can be found in case of emergency services are needed and keeps track of addresses which are updated (for example, a new home is built on an established street).

Delivery point validation

DPV is another step to verify the address given. This step compares the address to another database to see if the address exists, checking to see if the City has a Street named correctly, then verifies the number falls within the address range for that street. Consider Main St has and address range of 1-45. If you upload 55 Main St, it would return an invalid DPV. if it's 35 Main St it would return valid. Depending on the service used for CASS, you may get a valid response for a building/home that does not exist (35 Main St is not there).

Now that CASS has been completed you can review the invalid addresses and try to correct these (keep in mind you may be trying to send to an address that is refusing mail. For example, a manufacturing facility and it's office building. Mail may be refused at the actual manufacturing plant and only go to the office building even though the address is correct.

Once the CASS process is completed, NCOA would be performed.

NCOA stands for National Change Of Address and is maintained by the USPS. This database contains records of all COA (Change Of Address) forms filed with the USPS. This process is required by USPS for any bulk mail being submitted. A NCOA process on a mailing list is valid for 90 days, but it's always a good idea to try and run NCOA within about 2 weeks prior to mailing in order to reduce the number of forwarded mail.