Colored envelopes cost more
Because if you send your letters in colorful envelopes, you have to pay more postage. It costs an additional 15 cents if the postal customer chooses an alternative envelope color instead of white – that’s a surcharge of 17.6 percent.
The background to this regulation is the sorting practice of Deutsche Post. Because colored envelopes are more difficult to process for the machines that pre-sort the letter products at the DAX group. The orange barcode is not visible on colored envelopes, so such products are difficult to process. Red, purple and green envelopes in particular require manual sorting by a postal employee, and pastel-colored envelopes are also said to cause problems. The additional costs of 15 cents are due to the forced sorting by hand.
A white address label can help
If you put your letter in the mailbox marked 85 cents instead of 1 euro, you have to hope for goodwill from the post office staff – sometimes letters are delivered even if they were franked incorrectly.
But if you want to be on the safe side that the mail is not going straight back to the sender, the only option is to send your mail in white envelopes or to stick the correct postage on the envelope. Alternatively, a white address label can help – this way the envelope stays colourful, but nothing stands in the way of machine sorting.
Editorial office finanzen.net
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