Dead Letter Office (DLO)

 

A Dead Letter Office (DLO) is a facility within a postal system where undelivered mail is processed. Mail is considered to be undeliverable when the address is invalid and cannot be delivered and there is no return address so it cannot be returned to the sender. 

                         

1905 Newfoundland KEVII plate proof.

At a DLO, mail is usually opened to try to find an address to forward to. The contents are read for clues. If an address is found, the envelope is usually sealed using postal seals or enclosed in plastic bags and delivered. If the letter or parcel is still undeliverable, valuable items are then auctioned off while the correspondence is usually destroyed. Despite this practice, in the past some undeliverable envelopes were acquired by philatelists.

The first Dead Letter Office in India was opened in Calcutta (the then capital of British India) in 1854. 

                       

1878, picture of Dead Letter Office, Calcutta.

DLO in Madras, Bombay, Lahore and Agra also started functioning in 1862. Karachi DLO started in 1870 and Nagpur in 1872. Lucknow in 1873. Agra DLO was shifted to Allahabad in 1873. Two more DLO's were established in 1875 at Mount Abu and Rangoon.

                         

DLO, Madras, registered on Postal Service, dated 29 December 1925

                       

DLO, Bombay dated 29 July 1908, on a postcard. 

In 1947, August, after India attained Independence, DLO's functioned from Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Lucknow, Nagpur and Patna. In 1948, Amritsar and Hyderabad DLO's started. 

In fact, Dead Letter Offices are not ''letter morgues'' rather they perform a better job than the Post Offices. In 1959, to add decency to their nomenclatures, the Dead Letter Offices in India were rechristened as Return Letter Offices (RLO's). All DLO's were converted to RLO's. Currently, 25 RLO's are functioning in India. Each of the 25 Postal circles in India has one RLO attached to it.

Dead letter offices go by different names in different countries. Other names include ''Returned letter Office'' or ''Undeliverable mail Offices''. The U.S. Post Office, as it was known then, started a dead letter office in 1825 to deal with undeliverable mail. By 1893, it handled about 20,000 items daily. In 2006, about 90 million undeliverable as addressed items ended up in the dead letter office of the U.S. Postal Service.

                           

The Dead Letter Office at Washington, a wood engraving sketched by Theodore Davis published in Harper's Weekly, February 22, 1868.

In the United Kingdom, a Dead Letter Office was first established in 1784 for dead and missent letters that had reached London. No postage was charged for returns, which were made after six months, when an addressee was found. From 1790, however a charge was made. In the UK, undeliverable mail is processed in the National Returns Centre in Belfast. 

Canada Post sends mail which is not deliverable to the Undeliverable Mail Office at Mississauga, Ontario, or North Sydney, Nova Scotia. 

                           

Canada, Dead Letter Office, officially sealed stamp, 1915.

                           

Registered 1c + 2c Drop letter to Dead Letter Office, mailed to and from Ottawa on July 09, 1888, received in DLO on August 06, 1888.

                         

DLO, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, dated 12 FEB 1945, returned to addressee in Kelowna, with a 3c return fee.
  

                     

Calgary was authorized to process undelivered mail in the 1920's. stamp of District Director of Postal Services, DLO, 2, CALGARY, dated Sep 15, 1942.                           

                           

1905 Newfoundland KEVII plate proof.

                           

Post Office Canada, Officially Sealed, 1913.

Dead Letter Offices are present in several countries, with different nomenclatures.

                           

Republic of Chile seal, with a blank area for the application of a postmark.

Dead Letter Offices.