For example, if I wanted to send a message from a small town in Massachusetts and wanted to send it to a small city in Georgia, what cities would the letter likely go to? What are the steps taken to make sure a letter gets to the destination with no errors?
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The letter is picked up by your delivery driver. They take it to the post office.
At the post office, they sort it by where it is going compared to where it is and then put it with other mail going in the same general direction. If the letter is local, it may not even leave your post office. If it isn’t local it is sent to a mail hub. In your example, the letter likely goes to the mail hub in New York, but it might go to a smaller one first.
Once there, the mail hub distributes it either to a local post office or sends it to a mail hub, possibly a centralized hub that mostly delivers to other hubs, that is closer to the destination.
Eventually, it gets to a mail hub that delivers to the local post office. After that, a delivery driver delivers it to the final address.
All mail is picked up by your mail carrier who delivers any mail for their route and takes the picked up mail to your local post office. Some mail is organized into groups by zip code at your local post office but some post offices do not have sort capability. Zip codes are arranged in 5 digit local post office and first 3 digit regional sort office groups. Some mail to your same zip code is held for the correct mail carrier for delivery the next day. All the other mail is passed to your regional sort office where it is taken by truck for drop off and pick up of new local mail for customers with your zip code. A truck goes back and forth every mail day between every local post office and their regional sort office.
The regional sort office sorts all the mail they get from all their local post offices and from all the other regional sort offices into zip code groups for their local zip codes and 3 digit regions for other regional sort offices. The regional sort offices drive mail to each other every mail day sometimes passing mail through several intermediate regional sort offices on the way to the destination regional sort office. Regional post office truck drivers usually do not do long distance drives of more than one day which is why the mail may go through intermediate regional sort offices. Sometimes first class or package mail is sent by passenger airplane in the luggage area rather than being driven if it needs to travel a long distance.
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