Neopost Postal Franking Machines

Trivia: The glitter in each of the seals is unique as the glitter position is random during manufacture and no two are the same. For high security tamper evidence, you can take a photo of the seal and verify that the glitter is identical as the serial can easily be duplicated. Some agencies also used glitter nail polish as a security seal for the same reason: the glitter is deposited in a random fashion as you dab and cannot be duplicated, so you can take a photo and verify that the glitter particles are in exactly the same position.

at a power draw of 10 microwatts, I caclulate that the large yellow lithium carbon monofluoride battery has delivered a little more than 8.4 kilojoules of energy over the past 27 years of its life, and at a rated capacity of 1.2 Ah, or about 13 kilojoules total, it likely still retained about a third of its original capacity. Suggesting that all else being equal, it could have potentially made it to the mid 2030s before dying. I find this pleasing.

I had an HP inkjet for a while. The cartridges did have a vacuum and were very hard to refill. All the red tape sounds like typical Royal Mail bureaucracy. As still reflected in their automated postal machines.

These machines aren't LIKE printing money. They ARE printing money. In many countries postage is legal tender. It can be spent like cash. I did some security work on the module that authorizes and tracks printing. (Not Neopost. A rival.) These modules are SERIOUS business. Boards and chips designed to self-destruct, dissolve, or change. Different epoxies with anti-tamper/scan properties. Pyrolytic layers that heat up when exposed to air/water. False boards/chips on the off chance you do somehow defeat some layers. We froze them in liquid nitrogen. Etched them in various solvents. X-ray, MRI, differing kinds of tomography. Ultrasound, infrasound, radar, etc. It was kind of crazy actually. But some of these machines printed $100,000-$200,000 a day so it was a pretty big target for tampering.

I used to watch someone else using a franking machine. The mail had to go into different coloured bags depending on whether it was first or second class, then a man came and collected them at a set time every afternoon and gave us new, empty bags to use the following day. I think you could bring the bags to them a bit later in the day, if you weren't ready when he arrived, but they didn't like you doing that very often and you risked missing the deadline and having to send everything the following day instead. You would also get penalised if they found you had put second class mail in a first class bag. I suppose the bags might have identified the business that was sending the mail, possibly with some kind of security seal, but I can't remember. I suppose one reason to be strict about the franked date being the actual date of postage is to avoid making it look like the item has been delayed in the postal system. An apparent delay might cause the mail to get unfairly prioritised in the system, or could make it seem to have been delivered late, damaging the reputation of the postal service or opening them up to claims of compensation. And depending on what you're posting, the official date of postage might carry quite a lot of legal weight and ought not to be falsified.

I used to work as a service tech on those old neopost 20 years ago, this brings back memories :D the mechanics on those old franking machines worked like a tank, could frank thousands of letters a day no problem, the main problem was that the rubber rollers would wear out and needed replacing.

The burocracy around the stamped date is important, because the date on a postal stamp (used to be?) a huge deal, because official paperwork took into account the date it was posted (and hence stamped), instead of the date it was received.

You are right, they had to be carried to a specific post office that you had to choose upon getting this set up. The post office then counted the number of letters and checked if that matched up with your credit. I did this clerk stuff as a student for a couple of months. The letters needed to be sorted into special yellow (for German Post) stackable plastic bins so they were able to relate the to a specific customer.

Worked at Pitney Bowes in Harlow from 1997 to 2006. I worked on the B900 series which is similar to the mechanical machine you had and the B700 which was their first digital meter that used thermal transfer. Recharges were done using a system called RMRS (postage by phone) where you dialled a number and got a code that would add a preset amount of credit. They had a mechanical version of this on their 5300 series meters (70s/80s) that used a metal punched tape to store the codes.

I worked in a post room for a while in the early 90's. The franking machine we had was quite basic, you had to physically take it to the main post office to get it topped up. We also had to take the franked mail in the 1st and 2nd class bags to the sorting office as well, nobody ever came to collect it.

Hi, that takes me back i bit. I worked for the company for 27 years in the R&D department. They were based at RONEO corner in Romford Essex. They made and sold other office equipment over a long period under RONEO and various other names, Roneo Vickers, Roneo Alcatel, Alcatel Business Systems, and NEOPOST. The port in the side was used to recredit the meter via a Credipac module or via a modem link which was called Credifon.

I love these videos, not only finding out about very obscure job specific equipment most people are unlikely to ever encounter, but also taking the thing to bits and seeing how it works. I could watch you do this all day.

Whenever my boss wanted some spending money, he'd 'accidentally' print off £100 frank and get a refund check from the PO.

That hidden ink cartridge is obviously the same as as a regular 45 consumer cartridge which has been around since the late 90s. Specialty applications like this might be why HP still sells this cartridge even though they have discontinued much newer types. The HP specialty printing solutions website is filled with 45 variants like this, it's not even hidden in a legacy products section.

When asking any of the questions you asked, the answer is almost always "security". These would absolutely NOT be field upgradeable. There is no need for access because anything other than printing would be a breach. There shouldn't be any going to liquidation either, because they required weekly check-ins at a post office. If they didn't check-in, someone would go out and find the units. These really do print money. The security around them was extensive. The older machine was probably from the 80s though. By the 90s they had much more sophisticated anti-tampering systems. They stayed in service forever though. They would come off-lease, get brought in for service/upgrades, then go out to a different market for another decade.

EBay in Italy forbids sale of such machines apparently. Even obsolete ones are scrapped

We supplied the motors up to the early 2000's for the older model - they were built to Neopost specification, who were a very secretive and reticent client.

My uncle ran an auction business in the 80's and had a Pitney Bowes franking machine for the monthly catalogue mailing. He absolutely hated the machine - and the company, he would often be heard ranting about them and their exorbitant fees and terrible service. It frequently went wrong, jamming, chewing up envelopes etc., it drove him nuts.

Occasionally a mail carrier would come in with a package with fees due and we'd just roll off a "stamp" to pay it. Even for hundreds of dollars. This was a couple decades ago and we had the older mechanical style unit.

The 6 layer board might contain a further security mesh to protect against drilling attacks and the lengths they went to on the security module suggests the lack of electronic tamper detection on the main unit wasn't an oversight, it just simply wasn't necessary but then that leads to the question of why was the physical seal needed? Maybe just a decoy/deterrent against people having a go.