When printing mailing labels on PBS,  three options given: green, yellow, and colorless.

The green option is as follows:

Pam - I can only answer part of your question, but I do know that the extra postage (18 cents) is included by Encardia for the green option.  I'm sure someone will come along who can answer the rest!

All electronic postage (that I know of) requires e-DC and if you use electronic postage, you need to pay for all  postage being printed on the label.  So if you have prepaid postage they can assume the DC fee was paid to endicia. There should never be a need to add stamps to an postage prepaid label unless additional services are being added after the fact.

The e-DC without paid postage is a hit and miss at the PO. Sometime they catch if it wasn't paid, sometimes they don't. Too many USPS employees have no idea how to handle them so some just ignore them. Some do catch it so you don't want to risk sending one without the added postage. 

The machines that do the scanning don't look for proof of pmt , they just scan the barcode and log.

Thanks, Amy and Melanie. Lately, I've been thinking about why the PBS/Encartia/USPS Delivery Confirmation system seems to be "willy-nilly" in its function.

Question: (a) This option includes the bar code of the addressee, the delivery confirmation bars but no indication on the mailing label that an additional 18 cents must be applied AFTER the label is printed? How do postal officials know that the mailer must add 18 cents for the "yellow" option but not for the "green" option?

The yellow option is the one I use.  When you print it out, it does specify in the 'apply postage here' box the postage plus the $.18 and the total of those.  So if you're putting the postage on yourself, it does remind you about the extra $.18.  Also, if you take the packages to the post office to pay, which I do, they'll scan the package there in order to get the $.18 for the DC added after they've got the appropriate postage set up.  (And since it gets scanned, I've always received my quick credit by the next morning.)

Green Answers:

(a) Why is no bar code printed for the addressee;

Companies who offer printable postage have to get their mailing labels approved by the USPS. The labels that USPS approved for PBS don't have the Postnet barcode. No idea why, but PBS can't add it now without going through the whole approval process again.

(b) How do postal officials "know" from the label that the delivery confirmation additional fee of 18 cents has been pre-paid by Endicia and that no application of additional stamps for DC by the sender are required?

That square thing in the upper right corner of the wrapper where the stamps would normally be is a 2-D barcode (the ones used for DC and Postnet are linear barcodes). It includes info such as the amount of postage paid. All they have to do is weigh the package and read the barcode to make sure it has the right amount of postage for the services indicated on the label. For a machine, this is actually easier than reading stamps to figure out if there are enough.

Does that mean that I add an additional 18 cents myself to the Green option label? Does "will add" in this scenario mean "has already been added by Endicia?"

Do not add any stamps to a wrapper that includes printable postage. The PBS server tells the Endicia server how much postage to put on the wrapper. It includes the 18 cents.

Yellow Answers:

(a) This option includes the bar code of the addressee, the delivery confirmation bars but no indication on the mailing label that an additional 18 cents must be applied AFTER the label is printed? How do postal officials know that the mailer must add 18 cents for the "yellow" option but not for the "green" option?

They weigh the package and look at the services requested on the label to figure out how much postage is owed and compare it to the amount of postage applied; same as anything else you mail. If you don't put enough stamps on this kind of label, then it may be returned to you or delivered postage due. Sometimes they don't catch these, but don't count on that (besides, if you deliberately underpay postage, then it's theft.)

(b) Why is the addressee's bar code printed on this mailing label but not on the green option label as referenced above?

See previous answer about Postnet barcodes. They're nice-to-have because they help the automated sorting machines, but not required.

The yellow option has an asterisk leading to the aforementioned statement:

* I understand that, once printing has occurred, the postage and PBS fee for this service are non-refundable. Delivery confirmation will add an additional $0.18 to the postage costs.

This "will add" means that I do the adding of the 18 cents after printing the mailing label. Yet, when I once forgot to add the 18 cents manually with stamps, the package was tracked via Delivery Confirmation regardless. That incident led me to conjecture that the postal officials don't know whether Delivery Confirmation fees have been paid regardless of the presence of Delivery Confirmation codes on the mailing labels.

They do know if they take the time to look at the package and weigh it. They just didn't bother that one time.

Adding to the above replies to the yellow option....

Many postal employess do not know how much postage should be on any piece of mail beyond a regular letter. It is just not part of the job they do. Others should know and either never got the information or do not remember it.

I think the postal service will slowly change and begin checking more often as more PC postage is used. Some postal employees try to check all PC postage because of the few bad apples out there trying to send everything media mail to get the cheaper rate or paying for 1 pound and sending 10.