How does the postal service sort your mail?

You drop a letter into a mailbox, and a few days later it arrives at exactly the right address. But how does the Postal Service sort hundreds of millions of pieces of mail and make sure your letter reaches the correct mailbox? In this video, we follow a typical letter through the U.S. postal system — from the moment it reaches a processing facility to automated address reading, routing, repeated sorting, local delivery, and finally your mail carrier. The scale is enormous. In fiscal year 2025, the U.S. Postal Service processed and delivered an average of about 361 million pieces of mail per day — roughly 4,180 pieces every second. And the sorting process goes much further than simply identifying a ZIP Code. Automated equipment can progressively narrow down where a letter belongs until much of the mail is arranged into “delivery point sequence” — the order a carrier is expected to deliver it along the route. So how does one envelope make it through a system handling hundreds of millions of pieces of mail? Here’s how the Postal Service sorts your mail. #USPS #PostalService #Mail #HowItWorks #Explained #TakeRateResearch