>John,
>
>IMB is pretty darned cool. I've been working on a system for the last two years that has currently tracked 3,628,964,104 scans of 2,259,953,921 pieces of mail.

If you are mailing that kind of volume there are some real benefits to the IMB. But the $25,000 subscription you are paying for the tracking data is a minuscule amount at that volume. And the value of the data in that size of an operation would be very high. But it's really hard to justify that in a smaller operation or for a smaller mailer where the data is costing .005 or more per piece as opposed to 0.0000069!

(BTW, that .005 is under the ideal circumstances of mailing 200,000 pieces per year. Change that to 400,000 and it will cost you .015 cents each, go down to 50,000 and it's running you .02 each.)

The IMB is cool if you can actually benefit from one of the extra services it provides. In your case it saves you from having to print the planet code, which is sweet!

However, for the most part, none of the extra services are priced in such a way as to be valuable for the smaller mailer. What the smaller mailer gets instead is a larger barcode, that takes up more room on his mail piece, and is much more complex to create, and cannot be verified by hand, because it is no longer human readable.

For the smaller mailer IMB is just a PITA! It's just an added cost with no added value.