Please, please forgive me if this has been explained before. But maybe a little background would help some understand why envelopes aren't a good idea. I think folks are under the impression that their mail is being hand sorted somewhere and a nice postal employee is being careful with it.

The USPS is an automated animal these days. All the mail goes through machines or is attempted to be put through machines. (it saves money) Did you know the machines can read handwritten addresses now? Or at least transmit a real time image of your envelope to an operator in a another building who will read it and then type in the information if you have messy handwriting. Once that is done, they spray the little barcode on the envelope and from then on, the rest of the machines just read the barcode to know where to send your letter next.

Letters are picked up by vacuum power suction arms and fed, through a series of rapidly spinning belts. These belts move at incredible speeds around guideposts, twisting and turning in "S" (or more complicated) shaped paths. (I can't explain this very well, it's been many years and I'm not an engineer.)

Each letter gets zipped through many different kinds of machines, sometimes over and over again as they are sorted and resorted to their destination. When they contain a hard object (like a chip) they are non-machineable. That's a postal term for "S*** that jams up the machine."

Either your letter jams a belt and stops the entire operation, or the chip was ripped out of the envelope on it's first "pass". It fell to the floor and will be swept up by maintenance at the end of the shift with all the other little trinkets that didn't make it that night. I was always amazed at the amount of stuff found underneath that operation. It looked like some one had been busting pinatas at a party. (No they can't keep anything, it all goes into the trash)

The only way to ensure your letter (with the chip) reaches it destination, is to make sure it NEVER GOES INTO THE MACHINES. There are a couple ways to do this:

1. Make your piece completely non-machinable. Yes, workers are supposed to cull out any obvious pieces, but a standard white envelope does not stand out in a giant hamper (the size of a big bathtub) full of mail. There is a machine that is supposed to help pick out non-machinable items. But it's still a machine, it doesn't have eyeballs.

Robrt E.'s envelopes work for him, because they never make it into a machine. They are too bulky and rigid and are culled out before they ever get that far. So if you make your piece so rigid it never makes it past the inital feeders into the machine, you're doing all right.

2. Go to the window, pay the non-machinable surcharge and the (hopefully aware) window clerk will put your standard envelope directly into the correct sack or tray of non-machinable mail. This doesn't always work because the folks in the front don't always have experience with mail processing. That happens in another facility, often in another town.

A regular envelope goes straight into the machinery no matter what you've written on it. No one sees those words until it's in human hands again at it's destination. By then it's often too late.

Photographers mastered all this years ago by using the cardboard sandwich method. They learned the hard way ($$$) that it's the sender's responsibility to protect their shipment from whatever might happen. They did a little research, found out what was happening to their envelopes and adjusted. It's their livelyhood and they weren't going to take any chances. (this was before digital)

I sorted tons (literally) of mail by hand on graveyard shifts for years. The only thing we hand sorted (and the only thing still hand sorted) was non-machinable mail. I never knew what all those padded envelopes were until now.

So if you send chips in envelopes and think they are always going to arrive in one piece, you are naively playing the odds and will lose one eventually. In the meantime, your letter is one of hundreds that postal employees fish out of the machinery every night and send to the hand sort area, shaking their heads saying "What were they thinking? This must not be anything important."

That's the end of my rant. I apologize if you've already heard this from other postal folks. But I thought with all of us new members, it might be helpful to someone.