All Royal Mail bulk mail products, require at least 90 percent postcode and address accuracy. The presort module will determine the accuracy in one or two ways:

• Over the correctness of the postcode.
• Over a Validation Status field in the file.

Postcode checking:

The presort module will check the postcode by one of the following methods:

• Postcode pattern checking only. When you do not have the FlexMail Royal Mail address Validation available, FlexMail will only be able to assume correctness of the postcode based on checking the pattern of the postcode (for more information, see How Royal Mail presort works.

• Postcode check against the PAF file. When you also have installed the FlexMail Royal Mail address Validation module, FlexMail will be able to do a full check for the validity of the postcode against the PAF file.

  NOTE: At this stage, FlexMail will only check the existence of the postcode on its own. FlexMail will not check the correctness of the other address elements. If you want to verify the complete address, you can use the FlexMail Saddress Validation module (for more information, see Address Validation.

Address checking:

For checking the address accuracy itself, FlexMail will either depend upon the validity of the postcode (see above), or use the validation status is a file that has been validated with the Flexmail Address Validation module:

• Use postcode to assume address accuracy. When the FlexMail Royal Mail address Validation is not available, and the address file has not been validated, FlexMail will only be able to assume correctness of the address based on the postcode checking as described above..

• Calculate address accuracy over Validation Status field. When the file has been been validated against PAF, and a status field has been added to the database, FlexMail can use the values in this status field to determine the correctness of each individual address and calculate the percentage of address accuracy. Addresses with a Valid or Corrected status will be calculated as correct addresses in the overall calculation. For more information about the Status Fields see Validation status codes.

The result of the postcode and address checking as described above will be reflected in Postcode Statistics section of the summary (Computer Planning Report) after you have run a Presort. FlexMail will automaically calculate the correct prices and discount based on the calculated value.

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