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An envelope is a common
packaging Packaging is the science, art and technology of enclosing or protecting products for distribution, storage, sale, and use. Packaging also refers to the process of designing, evaluating, and producing packages. Packaging can be described as a co ...
item, usually made of thin, flat material. It is designed to contain a flat object, such as a
letter Letter, letters, or literature may refer to: Characters typeface * Letter (alphabet), a character representing one or more of the sounds used in speech; any of the symbols of an alphabet. * Letterform, the graphic form of a letter of the alphabe ...
or
card Card or The Card may refer to: * Various types of plastic cards: **By type ***Magnetic stripe card *** Chip card *** Digital card **By function ***Payment card ****Credit card **** Debit card ****EC-card ****Identity card ****European Health Insur ...
. Traditional envelopes are made from sheets of paper cut to one of three shapes: a
rhombus In plane Euclidean geometry, a rhombus (plural rhombi or rhombuses) is a quadrilateral whose four sides all have the same length. Another name is equilateral quadrilateral, since equilateral means that all of its sides are equal in length. The ...
, a short-arm cross or a kite. These shapes allow the envelope structure to be made by folding the sheet sides around a central rectangular area. In this manner, a rectangle-faced enclosure is formed with an arrangement of four flaps on the reverse side.


Overview

A folding sequence such that the last flap closed is on a short side is referred to in commercial envelope
manufacture Manufacturing is the creation or production of goods with the help of equipment, labor, machines, tools, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It is the essence of secondary sector of the economy. The term may refer to a rang ...
as a pocket – a format frequently employed in the
packaging Packaging is the science, art and technology of enclosing or protecting products for distribution, storage, sale, and use. Packaging also refers to the process of designing, evaluating, and producing packages. Packaging can be described as a co ...
of small quantities of seeds. Although in principle the flaps can be held in place by securing the topmost flap at a single point (for example with a wax seal), generally they are pasted or gummed together at the overlaps. They are most commonly used for enclosing and sending
mail The mail or post is a system for physically transporting postcards, letter (message), letters, and parcel (package), parcels. A postal service can be private or public, though many governments place restrictions on private systems. Since the mid ...
(
letters Letter, letters, or literature may refer to: Characters typeface * Letter (alphabet), a character representing one or more of the sounds used in speech; any of the symbols of an alphabet. * Letterform, the graphic form of a letter of the alphabe ...
) through a prepaid-postage
postal system The mail or post is a system for physically transporting postcards, letters, and parcels. A postal service can be private or public, though many governments place restrictions on private systems. Since the mid-19th century, national postal syst ...
. Window envelopes have a hole cut in the front side that allows the paper within to be seen. They are generally arranged so that the receiving address printed on the letter is visible, saving duplication of the address on the envelope itself. The window is normally covered with a transparent or translucent film to protect the letter inside, as was first designed by Americus F. Callahan in 1901 and patented the following year. In some cases, shortages of materials or the need to economize resulted in envelopes that had no film covering the window. One innovative process, invented in Europe about 1905, involved using hot oil to saturate the area of the envelope where the address would appear. The treated area became sufficiently translucent for the address to be readable. there is no international standard for window envelopes, but some countries, including
Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...
and the
United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...
, have national standards. An
aerogram An aerogram, aerogramme, aérogramme, air letter or airletter is a thin lightweight piece of foldable and gummed paper for writing a letter for transit via airmail, in which the letter and envelope are one and the same. Most postal administration ...
is related to a
letter sheet In philatelic terminology a letter sheet, often written lettersheet, is a sheet of paper that can be folded, usually sealed (most often with sealing wax in the 18th and 19th centuries), and mailed without the use of an envelope, or it can also ...
, both being designed to have writing on the inside to minimize the weight. Any handmade envelope is effectively a letter sheet because prior to the folding stage it offers the opportunity for writing a message on that area of the sheet that after folding becomes the inside of the face of the envelope. For document security, the letter sheet can be sealed with wax. Another secure form of letter sheet is a locked letter, that is formed by cutting and folding the sheet in an elaborate way that prevents the letter from being opened without creating obvious damage to the letter/envelope. The "envelope" used to launch the
Penny Post The Penny Post is any one of several postal systems in which normal letters could be sent for one penny. Five such schemes existed in the United Kingdom while the United States initiated at least three such simple fixed rate postal arrangements. U ...
component of the
British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies. ** Britishness, the British identity and common culture * British English, ...
postal reforms of 1840 by
Sir Rowland Hill Sir Rowland Hill, KCB, FRS (3 December 1795 – 27 August 1879) was an English teacher, inventor and social reformer. He campaigned for a comprehensive reform of the postal system, based on the concept of Uniform Penny Post and his soluti ...
and the invention of the
postage stamp A postage stamp is a small piece of paper issued by a post office, postal administration, or other authorized vendors to customers who pay postage (the cost involved in moving, insuring, or registering mail), who then affix the stamp to the fa ...
, was a lozenge-shaped lettersheet known as a Mulready. If desired, a separate letter could be enclosed with postage remaining at one penny provided the combined weight did not exceed half an ounce (14 grams). This was a legacy of the previous system of calculating postage, which partly depended on the number of sheets of paper used. During the
U.S. Civil War The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), the latter formed by states t ...
those in the
Confederate States Army The Confederate States Army, also called the Confederate Army or the Southern Army, was the military land force of the Confederate States of America (commonly referred to as the Confederacy) during the American Civil War (1861–1865), fighting ...
occasionally used envelopes made from wallpaper, due to financial hardship. A "return envelope" is a pre-addressed, smaller envelope included as the contents of a larger envelope and can be used for courtesy reply mail,
metered reply mail Metered reply mail, or MRM, is a type of mail in which a business sends pre-printed, self-addressed envelopes or postcards to customers, with postage prepaid on the envelopes or postcards with a postage meter. It is thus similar to courtesy reply ...
, or
freepost Freepost is a postal service provided by various postal administrations, whereby a person sends mail without affixing postage, and the recipient pays the postage when collecting the mail. Freepost differs from self-addressed stamped envelopes ...
(business reply mail). Some envelopes are designed to be reused as the return envelope, saving the expense of including a return envelope in the contents of the original envelope. The
direct mail Advertising mail, also known as direct mail (by its senders), junk mail (by its recipients), mailshot or admail (North America), letterbox drop or letterboxing (Australia) is the delivery of advertising material to recipients of postal mail. The d ...
industry makes extensive use of return envelopes as a response mechanism. Up until 1840, all envelopes were handmade, each being individually cut to the appropriate shape out of an individual rectangular sheet. In that year George Wilson in the
United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...
patented the method of
tessellating A tessellation or tiling is the covering of a surface, often a plane (mathematics), plane, using one or more geometric shapes, called ''tiles'', with no overlaps and no gaps. In mathematics, tessellation can be generalized to high-dimensional ...
(tiling) a number of envelope patterns across and down a large sheet, thereby reducing the overall amount of waste produced per envelope when they were cut out. In 1845 Edwin Hill and Warren de la Rue obtained a
patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A p ...
for a
steam Steam is a substance containing water in the gas phase, and sometimes also an aerosol of liquid water droplets, or air. This may occur due to evaporation or due to boiling, where heat is applied until water reaches the enthalpy of vaporization ...
-driven machine that not only cut out the envelope shapes but creased and folded them as well. (Mechanised
gumming Gummosis is the formation of patches of a gummy substance on the surface of certain plants, particularly fruit trees. This occurs when sap oozes from wounds or cankers as a reaction to outside stimuli such as adverse weather conditions, infection ...
had yet to be devised.) The convenience of the sheets ready cut to shape popularized the use of machine-made envelopes, and the economic significance of the factories that had produced handmade envelopes gradually diminished. As envelopes are made of paper, they are intrinsically amenable to embellishment with additional graphics and text over and above the necessary postal markings. This is a feature that the
direct mail Advertising mail, also known as direct mail (by its senders), junk mail (by its recipients), mailshot or admail (North America), letterbox drop or letterboxing (Australia) is the delivery of advertising material to recipients of postal mail. The d ...
industry has long taken advantage of—and more recently the
Mail Art Mail art, also known as postal art and correspondence art, is an artistic movement centered on sending small-scale works through the postal service. It initially developed out of what eventually became Ray Johnson's New York Correspondence Schoo ...
movement. Custom printed envelopes has also become an increasingly popular marketing method for
small business Small businesses are types of corporations, partnerships, or sole proprietorships which have fewer employees and/or less annual revenue than a regular-sized business or corporation. Businesses are defined as "small" in terms of being able to ap ...
. Most of the over 400 billion envelopes of all sizes made worldwide are machine-made.


Sizes


International standard sizes

International standard international standard is a technical standard developed by one or more international standards organizations. International standards are available for consideration and use worldwide. The most prominent such organization is the International Or ...
ISO 269 (withdrawn in 2009 without replacement) defined several standard envelope sizes, which are designed for use with
ISO 216 ISO 216 is an international standard for paper sizes, used around the world except in North America and parts of Latin America. The standard defines the "A", "B" and "C" series of paper sizes, including A4, the most commonly available paper size ...
standard
paper sizes Paper size standards govern the size of sheets of paper used as writing paper, stationery, cards, and for some printed documents. The ISO 216 standard, which includes the commonly used A4 size, is the international standard for paper size. I ...
: The German standard DIN 678 defines a similar list of envelope formats. DL comes from the DIN Lang (German: "Long") size envelope which originated in the 1920s.


North American sizes

There are dozens of sizes of envelopes available in the United States. The designations such as "A2" do not correspond to ISO paper sizes. Sometimes, North American paper jobbers and printers will insert a hyphen to distinguish from ISO sizes, thus: A-2. The No. 10 envelope is the standard business envelope size in the United States. PWG 5101.1 also lists the following even inch sizes for envelopes: , , , , , and . Envelopes accepted by the U.S. Postal Service for mailing at the price of a letter must be: * Rectangular * At least  inches high × 5 inches long × 0.007 inch thick. * No more than  inches high ×  inches long ×  inch thick. * Letters that have a length-to-height aspect ratio of less than 1.3 or more than 2.5 are classified as "non-machinable" by the USPS and may cost more to mail.


Chinese sizes


Japanese sizes

Japanese traditional rectangular (''kakukei'') and long (''chōkei'') envelopes open on the short side, while Western-style (''youkei'') envelopes open on the long side.


Manufacture


History of envelopes

The first known envelope was nothing like the paper envelope of today. It can be dated back to around 3500 to 3200 BC in the ancient Middle East. Hollow clay spheres were molded around financial tokens and used in private transactions. The two people who discovered these first envelopes were
Jacques de Morgan Jean-Jacques de Morgan (3 June 1857, Huisseau-sur-Cosson, Loir-et-Cher – 14 June 1924) was a French people, French mining engineer, geologist, and archaeologist. He was the director of antiquities in Khedivate of Egypt, Egypt during the 19th ...
, in 1901, and Roland de Mecquenem, in 1907. Paper envelopes were developed in China, where paper was invented by 2nd century BC. Paper envelopes, known as ''chih poh'', were used to store gifts of money. In the
Southern Song The Song dynasty (; ; 960–1279) was an Dynasties in Chinese history, imperial dynasty of China that began in 960 and lasted until 1279. The dynasty was founded by Emperor Taizu of Song following his usurpation of the throne of the Later Zhou. ...
dynasty, the Chinese imperial court used paper envelopes to distribute monetary gifts to government officials. In Western history, from the time flexible writing material became more readily available in the 13th century until the mid-19th century, correspondence was typically secured by a process of letter folding and sealing which sometimes employed elaborate
letterlocking Letterlocking is the act of folding and securing a written message (such as a letter) on papyrus, parchment, or paper, without requiring it to be contained in an envelope or packet. It is a traditional method of document security that utilizes fol ...
techniques to indicate tampering or prove authenticity. Some of these techniques, which could involve stitching or wax seals, were also employed to secure hand-made envelopes. Prior to 1840, handmade envelopes were all that were available for use, both commercial and domestic. In 1840 George Wilson of London was granted a patent for an envelope-cutting machine (patent: "an improved paper-cutting machine"), but the envelopes still needed to be hand folded. There is a picture of the front and backside of an envelope stamped in 1841 here on this page. It seems to be machine cut. In 1845, Edwin Hill and Warren De La Rue were granted a British patent for the first envelope-folding machine. The "envelopes" produced by the Hill/De La Rue machine were not like those used today. They were flat diamond, lozenge (or
rhombus In plane Euclidean geometry, a rhombus (plural rhombi or rhombuses) is a quadrilateral whose four sides all have the same length. Another name is equilateral quadrilateral, since equilateral means that all of its sides are equal in length. The ...
)-shaped sheets or "blanks" that had been precut to shape before being fed to the machine for creasing and made ready for folding to form a rectangular enclosure. The edges of the overlapping flaps treated with a paste or
adhesive Adhesive, also known as glue, cement, mucilage, or paste, is any non-metallic substance applied to one or both surfaces of two separate items that binds them together and resists their separation. The use of adhesives offers certain advant ...
and the method of securing the envelope or wrapper was a user choice. The symmetrical flap arrangement meant that it could be held together with a single wax seal at the apex of the topmost flap. (That the flaps of an envelope can be held together by applying a seal at a single point is a classic design feature of an envelope.) Nearly 50 years passed before a commercially successful machine for producing pre-gummed envelopes, like those in use today, appeared. The origin of the use of the diamond shape for envelopes is debated. However, as an alternative to simply wrapping a sheet of paper around a folded letter or an invitation and sealing the edges, it is a tidy and ostensibly paper-efficient way of producing a rectangular-faced envelope. Where the claim to be paper-efficient fails is a consequence of paper manufacturers normally making paper available in rectangular sheets, because the largest size of envelope that can be realised by cutting out a diamond or any other shape which yields an envelope with symmetrical flaps is smaller than the largest that can be made from that sheet simply by folding. The folded diamond-shaped sheet (or "blank") was in use at the beginning of the 19th century as a novelty wrapper for invitations and letters among the proportion of the population that had the time to sit and cut them out and were affluent enough not to bother about the waste offcuts. Their use first became widespread in the UK when the British government took monopoly control of postal services and tasked
Rowland Hill Sir Rowland Hill, KCB, FRS (3 December 1795 – 27 August 1879) was an English teacher, inventor and social reformer. He campaigned for a comprehensive reform of the postal system, based on the concept of Uniform Penny Post and his soluti ...
with its introduction. The new service was launched in May 1840 with a postage-paid machine-printed illustrated (or pictorial) version of the wrapper and the much-celebrated first adhesive postage stamp, the
Penny Black The Penny Black was the world's first adhesive postage stamp used in a public postal system. It was first issued in the United Kingdom (referred to in philatelic circles as Great Britain), on 1 May 1840, but was not valid for use until 6 May. ...
, for the production of which the
Jacob Perkins Jacob Perkins (9 July 1766 – 30 July 1849) was an American inventor, mechanical engineer and physicist. Born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, Perkins was apprenticed to a goldsmith. He soon made himself known with a variety of useful mechanical ...
printing process was used to deter counterfeiting and forgery. The wrappers were printed and sold as a sheet of 12, with cutting the purchaser's task. Known as
Mulready stationery Mulready stationery describes the postal stationery letter sheets and envelopes that were introduced as part of the British Post Office postal reforms of 1840. They went on sale on 1 May 1840, and were valid for use from 6 May. The Mulready name ...
, because the illustration was created by the respected artist
William Mulready William Mulready (1 April 1786 – 7 July 1863) was an Irish genre painter living in London. He is best known for his romanticising depictions of rural scenes, and for creating Mulready stationery letter sheets, issued at the same time as the P ...
, the envelopes were withdrawn when the illustration was ridiculed and lampooned. Nevertheless, the public apparently saw the convenience of the wrappers being available ready-shaped, and it must have been obvious that with the stamp available totally plain versions of the wrapper could be produced and postage prepaid by purchasing a stamp and affixing it to the wrapper once folded and secured. In this way although the postage-prepaid printed pictorial version died ignominiously, the diamond-shaped wrapper acquired de facto official status and became readily available to the public notwithstanding the time taken to cut them out and the waste generated. With the issuing of the stamps and the operation and control of the service (which is a communications medium) in government hands the British model spread around the world and the diamond-shaped wrapper went with it. Hill also installed his brother Edwin as The Controller of Stamps, and it was he with his partner Warren De La Rue who patented the machine for mass-producing the diamond-shaped sheets for conversion to envelopes in 1845. Today, envelope-making machine manufacture is a long- and well-established international industry, and blanks are produced with a short-arm-cross shape and a kite shape as well as diamond shape. (The short-arm-cross style is mostly encountered in "pocket" envelopes i.e. envelopes with the closing flap on a short side. The more common style, with the closing flap on a long side, are sometimes referred to as "standard" or "wallet" style for purposes of differentiation.) The most famous paper-making machine was the
Fourdrinier machine A paper machine (or paper-making machine) is an industrial machine which is used in the pulp and paper industry to create paper in large quantities at high speed. Modern paper-making machines are based on the principles of the Fourdrinier Machin ...
. The process involves taking processed pulp stock and converting it to a continuous web which is gathered as a reel. Subsequently, the reel is guillotined edge to edge to create a large number of properly rectangular sheets because ever since the invention of Gutenberg's press paper has been closely associated with printing. To this day, all other mechanical printing and duplicating equipments devised in the meantime, including the
typewriter A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. Typically, a typewriter has an array of keys, and each one causes a different single character to be produced on paper by striking an inked ribbon selectivel ...
(which was used up to the 1990s for addressing envelopes), have been primarily designed to process rectangular sheets. Hence the large sheets are in turn guillotined down to the sizes of rectangular sheet commonly used in the commercial
printing Printing is a process for mass reproducing text and images using a master form or template. The earliest non-paper products involving printing include cylinder seals and objects such as the Cyrus Cylinder and the Cylinders of Nabonidus. The ea ...
industry, and nowadays to the sizes commonly used as feed-stock in office-grade computer printers, copiers and duplicators (mainly ISO, A4 and US Letter). Using any mechanical printing equipment to print on envelopes, which although rectangular, are in fact folded sheets with differing thicknesses across their surfaces, calls for skill and attention on the part of the operator. In commercial printing the task of printing on machine-made envelopes is referred to as "overprinting" and is usually confined to the front of the envelope. If printing is required on all four flaps as well as the front, the process is referred to as "printing on the flat". Eye-catching illustrated envelopes or pictorial envelopes, the origins of which as an artistic genre can be attributed to the Mulready stationery – and which was printed in this way – are used extensively for
direct mail Advertising mail, also known as direct mail (by its senders), junk mail (by its recipients), mailshot or admail (North America), letterbox drop or letterboxing (Australia) is the delivery of advertising material to recipients of postal mail. The d ...
. In this respect, direct mail envelopes have a shared history with
propaganda Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded ...
envelopes (or " covers") as they are called by philatelists.


Present and future state of envelopes

In 1998, the
U.S. Postal Service The United States Postal Service (USPS), also known as the Post Office, U.S. Mail, or Postal Service, is an independent agency of the executive branch of the United States federal government responsible for providing postal service in the U. ...
became the first postal authority to approve a system of printing digital stamps. With this innovative alternative to an adhesive-backed
postage stamp A postage stamp is a small piece of paper issued by a post office, postal administration, or other authorized vendors to customers who pay postage (the cost involved in moving, insuring, or registering mail), who then affix the stamp to the fa ...
, businesses could more easily produce envelopes in-house, address them, and customize them with advertising information on the face. The fortunes of the commercial envelope manufacturing industry and the postal service go hand in hand, and both link to the printing industry and the mechanized envelope processing industry producing equipment such as franking and addressing machines. Technological developments affecting one ricochet through the others: addressing machines print addresses, postage stamps are a print product, franking machines imprint a frank on an envelope. If fewer envelopes are required; fewer stamps are required; fewer franking machines are required and fewer addressing machines are required. For example, the advent of information-based indicia (IBI) (commonly referred to as digitally-encoded electronic stamps or digital indicia) by the US Postal Service in 1998 caused widespread consternation in the franking machine industry, as their machines were rendered obsolete, and resulted in a flurry of lawsuits involving Pitney Bowes among others. The advent of
e-mail Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...
in the late 1990s appeared to offer a substantial threat to the postal service. By 2008 letter-post service operators were reporting significantly smaller volumes of letter-post, specifically stamped envelopes, which they attributed mainly to e-mail. Although a corresponding reduction in the volume of envelopes required would have been expected, no such decrease was reported as widely as the reduction in letter-post volumes.


Types of envelopes


Windowed envelopes

A windowed envelope is an envelope with a plastic or
glassine Glassine is a smooth and glossy paper that is air, water, and grease resistant. It is usually available in densities between . It is translucent unless dyes are added to color it or make it opaque. It is manufactured by supercalendering: after ...
window in it. The plastic in these envelopes creates problems in
paper recycling The recycling of paper is the process by which waste paper is turned into new paper products. It has a number of important benefits: It saves waste paper from occupying homes of people and producing methane as it breaks down. Because paper fi ...
.


Security envelopes

Security envelopes have special
tamper-resistant Tamperproofing, conceptually, is a methodology used to hinder, deter or detect unauthorised access to a device or circumvention of a security system. Since any device or system can be foiled by a person with sufficient knowledge, equipment, and ti ...
and
tamper-evident Tamper-evident describes a device or process that makes unauthorized access to the protected object easily detected. Seals, markings, or other techniques may be tamper indicating. Tampering Tampering involves the deliberate altering or adultera ...
features. They are used for high value products and documents as well as for evidence for legal proceedings. Some security envelopes have a patterned tint printed on the inside, which makes it difficult to read the contents. Various patterns exist.


Mailers

Some envelopes are available for full-size documents or for other items. Some carriers have large mailing envelopes for their express services. Other similar envelopes are available at stationery supply locations. These mailers usually have an opening on an end with a flap that can be attached by gummed adhesive, integral
pressure-sensitive adhesive Pressure-sensitive adhesive (PSA, self-adhesive, self-stick adhesive) is a type of nonreactive adhesive which forms a bond when pressure is applied to bond the adhesive with a surface. No solvent, water, or heat is needed to activate the adhesive ...
, adhesive tape, or
security tape Security tape (or security label) is a type of adhesive tape used to help reduce shipping losses due to pilfering and theft. It helps reduce tampering or product adulteration. Often it is a pressure sensitive tape or label with special tamper ...
. Construction is usually: *
Paperboard Paperboard is a thick paper-based material. While there is no rigid differentiation between paper and paperboard, paperboard is generally thicker (usually over 0.30 mm, 0.012 in, or 12 Inch#equivalences, points) than paper and has certain ...
*
Corrugated fiberboard Corrugated fiberboard or corrugated cardboard is a type of packaging material consisting of a fluted corrugated sheet and one or two flat linerboards. It is made on "flute lamination machines" or "corrugators" and is used for making corrugated ...
*
Polyethylene Polyethylene or polythene (abbreviated PE; IUPAC name polyethene or poly(methylene)) is the most commonly produced plastic. It is a polymer, primarily used for packaging ( plastic bags, plastic films, geomembranes and containers including bo ...
, often a coextrusion *
Nonwoven fabric Nonwoven fabric is a fabric-like material made from staple fibre (short) and long fibres (continuous long), bonded together by chemical, mechanical, heat or solvent treatment. The term is used in the textile manufacturing industry to denote fabri ...


Padded mailers

Shipping envelopes can have padding to provide stiffness and some degree of
cushioning Package cushioning is used to protect items during shipment. Vibration and impact shock during shipment and loading/unloading are controlled by cushioning to reduce the chance of product damage. Cushioning is usually inside a shipping container s ...
. The padding can be ground
newsprint Newsprint is a low-cost, non-archival paper consisting mainly of wood pulp and most commonly used to print newspapers and other publications and advertising material. Invented in 1844 by Charles Fenerty of Nova Scotia, Canada, it usually has an ...
, plastic foam sheets, or bubble packing.


Inter-office envelopes

Various U.S. Federal Government offices use Standard Form (SF) 65 Government Messenger Envelopes for inter-office mail delivery. These envelopes are typically light brown in color and un-sealed with string-tied closure method and an array of holes throughout both sides such that it is somewhat visible what the envelope contains. Other colloquial names for this envelope include "Holey Joe" and "Shotgun" envelope due to the holey nature of the envelope. Address method is unique in that these envelopes are re-usable and the previous address is crossed out thoroughly and the new addressee (name, building, room, and mailstop) is written in the next available box. Although still in use, SF-65 is no longer listed on the
United States Office of Personnel Management The United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government that manages the US civilian service. The agency provides federal human resources policy, oversight and support, and tends t ...
website list of standard forms.Se
NIH.GOV Inter-Office Communications Mail Guide
for an example of usage instructions


See also

*
Back-of-the-envelope calculation A back-of-the-envelope calculation is a rough calculation, typically jotted down on any available scrap of paper such as an envelope. It is more than a guess but less than an accurate calculation or mathematical proof. The defining characteristic o ...
* ✉ Envelope character in the Dingbats section of Unicode *
Green envelope A green envelope (Malay: ''sampul hijau'' or ''sampul duit raya'') is a Malay adaptation of the Chinese red envelope custom. During the festival of Eid ul-Fitr, Muslims in Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, and Indonesia hand out money in green enve ...
, a Malay custom *
Red envelope In East and Southeast Asian cultures, a red envelope, red packet or red pocket () is a monetary gift given during holidays or for special occasions such as a wedding, a graduation, or the birth of a baby. Although the red envelope was populari ...
, a Chinese custom *
Return address In postal mail, a return address is an explicit inclusion of the address of the person sending the message. It provides the recipient (and sometimes authorized intermediaries) with a means to determine how to respond to the sender of the message i ...
*
Secrecy of correspondence __NOTOC__ The secrecy of correspondence (german: Briefgeheimnis, french: secret de la correspondance) or literally translated as secrecy of letters, is a fundamental legal principle enshrined in the constitutions of several European countries. It ...


References


Notes


External links

* Available via the Smithsonian
National Postal Museum The National Postal Museum, located opposite Union Station in Washington, D.C., United States, covers large portions of the Postal history of the United States and other countries. It was established through joint agreement between the United S ...
* * the ISO 216 paper size system and the ideas behind its design. * * Methods from the Envelope and Letter Folding Association * papersizes.guide {{Authority control Chinese inventions Domestic implements English inventions Packaging Paper products Postal history Postal systems Stationery