They use OCR to interpret as many addresses as possible, then resort to sending digital images of difficult labels to remote centers to be read by a human. See

They use OCR to interpret as many addresses as possible, then resort to sending digital images of difficult labels to remote centers to be read by a human. See http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/usps-remote-encoding-facility http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/usps-remote-encoding-faci... So, of course they have images of all your mail. Also, it's been known for some time that the federal government collects data on mail, like emails and phone calls. This article covers that, from 2013... https://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail... and it involves this program, which apparently exists for legitimate business purposes, but the data is also used for surveillance: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_Isolation_Control_and_Tracking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_Isolation_Control_and_T...