February 9, 2010

PostalOne! Outage Update

The PostalOne! ^® system has been down since 5:50 p.m. ET Friday, February 5, and is projected to be back up late tonight, February 9. Mailers will be notified when the system is restored. USPS acceptance sites continue to operate under contingency procedures. Mailers who normally bring in hardcopy postage statements should continue to do so. Mailers who submit postage statements electronically via Postal Wizard are required to submit hardcopy postage statements. Mailers authorized to submit mailing information electronically via Mail.dat or Mail.XML, should provide hardcopy statements and qualification summary (or summaries, as applicable). The hardcopy postage statements will be logged and used to validate the eDoc submitted once the system is restored.

Upon restoration of the PostalOne! system, acceptance sites will process postage statements as follows:

• For mailers who normally submit hardcopy postage statements, acceptance employees will enter the hardcopy statements presented during the outage.

• For mailers who normally submit postage statements via Postal Wizard, acceptance employees will compare the hardcopy postage statements submitted during the outage to the Postal Wizard statements that appear on the dashboard to finalize those that do appear. If a hardcopy statement was submitted during the outage and does not appear on the dashboard, acceptance employees will enter the hardcopy statement that was provided.

• Mailers who intended to send mailing information electronically (using Mail.dat or Mail.XML) during the outage, should submit their electronic mailing information upon system restoration for the mailings presented during the outage period. Acceptance employees will compare the hardcopy statements that were provided during the outage to the electronic statements appearing on the dashboard to ensure all mailings are presented and will finalize the electronic statements. Mailers are encouraged to work with USPS acceptance employees to verify that all jobs submitted for the outage period ? Friday, February 5 through Friday, February 9 ? appear correctly on the PostalOne! dashboard.

• The Mailing Date will reflect the actual date of mailing and will not be changed to the date the mailing was processed in the PostalOne! system.

These contingency procedures are posted on the RIBBS® landing page and under Intelligent Mail^® Services Latest News.

It has been determined that the outage was caused by database corruption. Root cause analysis is underway to determine how this can be prevented in the future.

FAST Update – As a reminder, although the FAST^® system is operational, only the online FAST application is available to schedule appointments.

eVS Update - eVS users are impacted by the PostalOne! outage as follows:

• eVS manifests received via the Product Tracking System are not being loaded into PostalOne! during the outage.

• Customers will continue to receive confirmation that the Product Tracking System has received their manifest files, and they will continue to receive their scan event information from the Product Tracking System.

• eVS Manifest files will be loaded into PostalOne! for payment and reconciliation when the system is restored.

• Customers will not need to provide hard copy postage statements for their eVS mailings during the outage.

For questions or concerns, feel free to contact your local Business Mail acceptance personnel or the PostalOne! Helpdesk at: 800-522-9085.