Important information from Royal Mail: Improved bulk mail portfolio available from 2nd April 2012

7th February 2012

Some important changes will be taking place to Royal Mail’s bulk mail products which will take effect from 2nd April 2012.

From this date, Royal Mail are renaming and reorganising their existing bulk mail services such as Mailsort, Presstream and Walksort into the following products:

  • Advertising Mail™
  • Sustainable® Advertising Mail
  • Publishing Mail
  • Business Mail 1st Class and Business Mail

Further details of the above are available from the product summary sheets which are available at www.mailsorttechnical.com.

At the same time Royal Mail are also replacing and renaming the Mailsort Database 2010 with a new version called Royal Mail Selection Files 2012. These will also go live on 2nd April in conjunction with the new products.  The new Selection Files are available to download now from www.mailsorttechnical.com.

Extra time to enable customers to make the transition

Royal Mail are mindful of the challenges some customers may have in changing to their amended product portfolio on 2nd April 2012, so during the period from 2nd April 2012 up to the end of Saturday May 12th 2012, they will continue to accept current products on Mailsort Database 2010 if customers are having difficulty posting under the revised specifications.

Please note that due to OBA system changes for the new product range, a limited number of existing product codes will change their product descriptions and some formats within them will not be available after 2nd April.  A full list of these will be made available shortly.

Further information and User Guides, etc will be made available over the coming weeks via mailsorttechnical.com.

Other important information for businesses

As part of our commitment to enable businesses to plan ahead, Royal Mail want to inform their customers about some important price changes that are also happening in April 2012:

  • Value Added Tax (VAT) on services - Changes to the rules about VAT on postal services and the way in which their services are regulated will affect the VAT status of a number of our products.  A summary of the main services affected is available at www.royalmail.com/vat.
  • Royal Mail intend to change prices with effect from April on the current and revised products.  They cannot announce all of their prices until their regulator, Ofcom, has completed its public consultation on the framework for postal services.   Royal Mail expect to be in a position to share the proposed new prices for account contract services in late February.  More detail can be found at www.royalmail.com/prices2012.

If you have any queries or questions concerning the above, then please email your business contact details to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .