Certified Mail vs. Certificate of Mailing: The Choice is Not Obvious

Use certified mail or a certificate of mailing in the U.S.? The latter has a presumption of delivery. The former no longer has that. This is legally a problem.

Registered mail, years ago, could not be used for mail having no monetary value, although it was often used that way, and clerks often wrote “nv” for value, presumably meaning ‘no value’.

Certified Mail, with or without a return receipt requested, now has a tracking number. That lets you trace whether it was delivered, by visiting the U.S. Postal Service’s website, USPS.com. You can check the next day and you get up to three years to do that.

However, if the postal worker who delivers it doesn’t record the delivery, then the official record basically says that it was not delivered. I mailed three items in 2022 by certified mail to addresses in my city and, more than a year later, the Postal Service’s website said none of them were delivered. Officially, all three made it to the final stage before delivery, but then weren’t delivered. I suspect they were all delivered but I have no proof of that. I hadn’t requested return receipts.

In 2023, someone sent me certified mail with a return receipt requested, and the return receipt had a tracking number. But the Postal Service gave me the whole item with the return receipt still attached. Perhaps this was because I received it at my post office box, where I received a slip telling me that there’s mail waiting for me at a window, and at the window the postal worker accepted the slip in exchange for giving me the mail. Regardless of why, the return receipt requested was still on the envelope. I asked if the Postal Service wanted the return receipt and the answer was no. I mailed the receipt back to the sender myself, but the Postal Service had no record of that. Over six months later, the Postal Service said “USPS doesn't yet have a status update on this item shipped from the Post Office.” For the item that had the return receipt, the USPS said after six months “A status update is not yet available on your package.”

But a Certificate Of Mailing (CTOM) has something nice about it, even though there’s no tracking number and no return receipt. The law, the last time I heard, applies a presumption of regularity. If you addressed the item and otherwise prepared it properly, like paying the right postage, gave the item to the Postal Service, and got a Certificate Of Mailing for it, then the law says that the Postal Service is presumed to have functioned with regularity and delivered the item. The recipient would have to prove that it wasn’t delivered, which isn’t easy, since you already have the Certificate Of Mailing. There’s no tracking number for anyone to enter into the USPS website to contradict your Certificate Of Mailing.

The Certificate Of Mailing has a possible additional advantage: that the service is usually not announced on the mail piece. Postage itself may be shown in an unusual way and a recipient may figure out why, but the fee for the Certificate itself having been paid is shown on the Certificate itself and that’s handed back to the sender.

The Certificate Of Mailing costs less than Certified Mail, even if you don’t request a return receipt with the latter.

With the Postal Service's view of some of the issues, they replied to me in February, 2024, about the problem.

If you need a return receipt, such as for a legal reason, your best choice may be to mail the item as two identical items, one with a Certificate Of Mailing and the other by Certified Mail, return receipt requested. It’ll cost more to do both, but maybe you have to.