page_title: Envelope
section_title: Present and future state of envelopes
hierarchical_section_title: Envelope / Manufacture / Present and future state of envelopes
caption_attribution_description: English: Mail Envelope (back to back)
context_page_description: An envelope is a common packaging item, usually made of thin, flat material. It is designed to contain a flat object, such as a letter or card.
  Traditional envelopes are made from sheets of paper cut to one of three shapes: a rhombus, a short-arm cross or a kite. These shapes allow for the creation of the envelope structure 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.
context_section_description: At the end of the 20th century, in 1998, the digital printing revolution delivered another benefit for small businesses when the U.S. Postal Service became the first postal authority to approve the introduction of a system of applying to an envelope in the printer bin of a PC sheet printer a digital frank or stamp delivered via the Internet. With this innovative alternative to an adhesive-backed postage stamp as the basis for an  Electronic Stamp Distribution (ESD) service, a business envelope could be produced in-house, addressed and customized with advertising information on the face, and ready to be mailed.
  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. They are all four symbiotic: technological developments affecting one obviously 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 and adoption 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 equipments were effectively rendered obsolescent and resulted in a flurry of lawsuits involving Pitney Bowes among others. The advent of e-mail 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 replacement by 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.
  Although, with regards to e-mail developments, there is a substantial threat of "technology replacing tradition". This is offset by the equal reasoning that the Universal Postal Union is an international specialised agency of the United Nations, and a source of revenue for the government. Consequently, any deterioration of domestic and international postal services attended by loss of revenue is a matter of governmental concern.
caption: Mail envelope certified by PHLPost
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