• Driver's license;
• State-issued nondriver identification;
• Passport (foreign or domestic);
• Military identification card.

For the full lowdown on meter mail, click here.

It's likely that your postcard had your return address on the back side ("Please send me a reprint of your article to....") or your invitation envelope bore the return address on the back flap. Your piece happened to fall backwards into the USPS sorting equipment, and your own address got scanned, barcoded and routed right back to you. Although automated sorting is very smart, it still cannot reliably tell back from front! The design of your mailpiece should take account of this.

The solution is to use foldover postcards like the change-of-address cards Station 17 furnishes (for an illustration, click here) (although these do cost more to mail), and to print your return address on the FRONT of invitation envelopes.

This item, whether obtained from a post office or printed from the web, should be sent to the postmaster for the zip code where the home is located; mail forwarding will be effective for six months. (Please note that this item should NOT be sent to Station 17.)

During the six-month period, you should contact your correspondents to give them your new address. The procedures described in our "Helpful Hints When Moving" section are generally applicable for personal mail too. To go there, click here.

You may find this a good time to clean up some of your personal junk mail. To go to the question about this, which has a handy link to further information, click here.

You will also need to advise Human Resources of your new address—this is important for mailing your W-2 form, annual benefits packet, etc. You can do this by submitting an updated Employee Information form, MC 2606, to Human Resources Records—2525 West End Avenue, or by mail to VU Station B 357700. This form can be ordered from the Copy Center, or can be downloaded from our Forms Management page—click here.

We use about 10,000 rubber bands weekly to bundle incoming and outgoing mail. Any spares you can send us help hold down costs. Put them in a campus envelope and send them to us at B-0106 MCN (2635).

Click to download a flyer that you can use to inform your staff about this: RUBBERBAND.PDF.

U.S. MAIL

There certainly are some circumstances under which chain letters that involve money might be illegal. Those that do not involve a request for funds probably should be considered as merely nuisances. This is addressed one the USPS website here.

To access the mail fraud complaint form from our USPS Forms list, click here.

(Nigerian fraud letters, although not technically chain letters, generate many legal questions. To get the lowdown on them, click here.)

CAMPUS MAIL

With regard to campus mail, we can give an unequivocal answer—YES! Chain letters are absolutely prohibited from the VUMC internal mail system. To see the Vice-Chancellor's Office's statement on this issue, click here. (This is a scanned file and may take a few moments to load.)

If you should receive a chain letter via campus mail, notify your supervisor and Post Office Station 17.

Three to five days is the USPS standard for ordinary first-class mail, and the standard for Priority Mail is 2-3 days.  Express Mail is the only service with a guaranteed delivery time, which is 1 or 2 days, depending on the zip code where it is going. Other items, such as parcel post, are slower and make take 10 days or so. For most types of foreign mail, we advise allowing at least double the domestic standard time.

CAMPUS MAIL

We strive for delivery within 24 hours, and in the major medical center buildings this goal is very often attained. It can possibly take two days, though, depending on when we receive the item vs. when the next delivery to the addressee occurs. Items going to the outer buildings (Village at Vanderbilt, Bill Wilkerson Center, etc.) require extra delivery procedures and should arrive in two to three days.

When sending mail from the Medical Center to the University side or vice-versa, keep in mind that the piece must be handled by both Post Offices, Station 17 and Station B. Three days is a reasonable expectation, but occasionally it may take four.

(In all cases, estimates on campus mail refer to working days—the intervention of a weekend or holiday may result in additional transit time.)

The Referral Directory is now online at the following link:

http://www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/refdir/

Printed versions can also still be obtained from:

Vanderbilt Medical Center
Marketing Department
405 Oxford House
Nashville, TN 37232-4335

Phone: (615) 936-0301
Fax: (615) 936-0320

You can also make sure that your referrors are aware of the Vanderbilt PeopleFinder utility:

http://www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/root/peoplefinder.html

These letters vary from extremely crude to quite professional. They always solicit the recipient's help in transferring funds, usually from a petroleum sale or similar transaction, to an account outside of Nigeria. Some kind of fee or percentage is promised, often quite a large sum.

Eventually, if the gullible person replies, a demand for money is made to facilitate the transaction in some way, to be wired or mailed to Nigeria. There have even been cases where foreign citizens were lured to Nigeria in order to be shaken down in person.

Authorities in the U.S. and other countries are well aware of these letters.  In fact, they are now reportedly being mailed from other countries because the Nigerian connection is so well known to foreign post offices.

Much information exists on the web about this problem.  See a U.S. Postal Service press release here, or see what the U.S. Treasury's Secret Service branch has to say here. You can also download an article from a recent USPS publication in PDF format here.  In addition, there is a master website that is entirely devoted to this issue:

http://home.rica.net/alphae/419coal/

Regrettably, this phenomenon is also spreading via e-mail.  If you would like to read a rather witty feature story from Salon.com on this subject, click here.  There's also a page that celebrates people who have tried to scam, or at least spoof, the scammers here.

We realize that these letters do occasionally come to VUMC addresses, but we have no way of distinguishing them from legitimate foreign mail. If one is received, there are instructions on the above website on how this may be reported to the appropriate authorities, but most people will prefer simply to throw it away.

We sometimes call this the OI distribution method, because it was developed to quickly disseminate information about the Operations Inprovement project several years ago. Other people sometimes call it Please Post distribution, because users often like to write "Please Post" on their flyers. Just bring us your copies to the Post Office and we'll understand either term. Depending on what time of day we get them, departments will receive your flyer that day or the next working day.

If you prefer, you can send your original and 1180 to the Copy Center, which will make the copies at its standard (low!) rates and send them to the Post Office for sorting.

(We thank the old Vanderbilt Register newspaper for permission to reprint this information.)