re: Sumlin's wife just posted a racist/threatening letter her husband received on Twitter

For anyone wanting to decipher the bar code. (I ain't got time for dat) I found this on another site:

If you want to read it, the first and last lines are start/stop characters, and then each group of 5 lines between them represent the digits in the zip code. The 5 lines represent 74210. Consider long lines as 'yes' and short lines as 'no'. The sum of those numbers represented by the long lines will equal the corresponding digit in the zip code. The check digit is calculated by taking the sum of the zip, plus 4 and the last 2 digits of the address and subtracting that from the next number that ends with zero (i.e. if the digits add up to 45, take 50 - 45 and the check digit would be 5).

The new barcodes (the ones with long and short lines appearing above and below the axis) are called Intelligent Mail Bar Codes (IMBCs), and contain a bit more info, including the mail ID of the sender, a code to identify the type of service, a unique serial number if it's being tracked, the zip& zip4, last 2 digits of the address, etc.

There are a few other types, but I probably bored you enough with this....

And no, I don't work for USPS, but I am in the mail/marketing industry, and this is part of the stuff I do...