I used to part time for the (Danish) mail service.
The only sorting that was done automatically was the post codes. That was enough to get the letter to the right post office. The rest was done by the mailmen/women early in the morning.
It was a lot of fun trying to figure out what was meant by some of the addresses. The older people in particular often knew the story of why certain places were sometimes addressed in certain ways, or could guess the addresses based on the names of the people living there.
replyGreat video by Tom Scott on this subject:
replyhaha this was great!
replyIIRC the USPS was one of the first big budget orgs behind early OCR systems all the way back in 1965.
replyThe USPS Remote Encoding Center in Salt Lake City examined 841,260,847 images of poorly written addresses in fiscal year 2025. [0]
replyUnfortunately the page does not have a base rate--the total number of mail pieces that were not prepared for automated processing. Total first class mail, which includes a lot of bills prepared for automation was 25.7 billion [1]. If 10% of that are non-automated, then .8 / 2.57 = .31 or a third of mail not prepared for automation is handled by "employees look at the image and type in address information"
0. https://facts.usps.com/remote-encoding-center-rec-decipherin...
1. https://about.usps.com/what/financials/10k-reports/fy2025.pd...