Envelope

International standard ISO 269 (since withdrawn) defined several standard envelope sizes, which are designed for use with ISO 216 standard paper sizes:

The German standard DIN 678 defines a similar list of envelope formats.

There are dozens of sizes of envelopes available in the United States.

The designations such as "A2" do not correspond to ISO paper sizes. Sometimes, North American paper jobbers and printers will insert a hyphen to distinguish from ISO sizes, thus: A-2.

The No. 10 envelope is the standard business envelope size in the United States.[5] PWG 5101.1[6] also lists the following even inch sizes for envelopes: 6 × 9, 7 × 9, 9 × 11, 9 × 12, 10 × 13, 10 × 14 and 10 × 15.

Envelopes accepted by the U.S. Postal Service for mailing at the price of a letter must be:

• Rectangular
• At least ​3 ¹⁄₂ inches high × 5 inches long × 0.007 inch thick.
• No more than ​6 ¹⁄₈ inches high × ​11 ¹⁄₂ inches long × ​¹⁄₄ inch thick.[7]
• Letters that have a length-to-height aspect ratio of less than 1.3 or more than 2.5 are classified as "non-machinable" by the USPS and may cost more to mail.[8]

Japanese traditional rectangular (kakukei) and long (chōkei) envelopes open on the short side, while Western-style (youkei) envelopes open on the long side.

Tablet and its sealed envelope: employment contract. Girsu, Sumer, circa 2037 BC. Terra cotta. Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon.

Red envelopes are an example of paper envelopes. They are used for monetary gifts.

The first known envelope was nothing like the paper envelope of today. It can be dated back to around 3500 to 3200 BC in the ancient Middle East. Hollow, clay spheres were molded around financial tokens and used in private transactions. The two people who discovered these first envelopes were Jacques de Morgan, in 1901, and Roland de Mecquenem, in 1907.

Paper envelopes were developed in China, where paper was invented by 2nd century BC.[9] Paper envelopes, known as chih poh, were used to store gifts of money. In the Southern Song dynasty, the Chinese imperial court used paper envelopes to distribute monetary gifts to government officials.[10]

Prior to 1845, hand-made envelopes were all that were available for use, both commercial and domestic. In 1845, Edwin Hill and Warren De La Rue were granted a British patent for the first envelope-making machine.[11]

The "envelopes" produced by the Hill/De La Rue machine were not like those used today. They were flat diamond, lozenge (or rhombus)-shaped sheets or "blanks" that had been precut to shape before being fed to the machine for creasing and made ready for folding to form a rectangular enclosure. The edges of the overlapping flaps treated with a paste or adhesive and the method of securing the envelope or wrapper was a user choice. The symmetrical flap arrangement meant that it could be held together with a single wax seal at the apex of the topmost flap. (That the flaps of an envelope can be held together by applying a seal at a single point is a classic design feature of an envelope.)

Nearly 50 years passed before a commercially successful machine for producing pre-gummed envelopes, like those in use today, appeared.

The origin of the use of the diamond shape for envelopes is debated. However, as an alternative to simply wrapping a sheet of paper around a folded letter or an invitation and sealing the edges, it is a tidy and ostensibly paper-efficient way of producing a rectangular-faced envelope. Where the claim to be paper-efficient fails is a consequence of paper manufacturers normally making paper available in rectangular sheets, because the largest size of envelope that can be realised by cutting out a diamond or any other shape which yields an envelope with symmetrical flaps is smaller than the largest that can be made from that sheet simply by folding.

Envelope with advertising from 1905 used in the U.S.

The folded diamond-shaped sheet (or "blank") was in use at the beginning of the 19th century as a novelty wrapper for invitations and letters among the proportion of the population that had the time to sit and cut them out and were affluent enough not to bother about the waste offcuts. Their use first became widespread in the UK when the British government took monopoly control of postal services and tasked Rowland Hill with its introduction. The new service was launched in May 1840 with a postage-paid machine-printed illustrated (or pictorial) version of the wrapper and the much-celebrated first adhesive postage stamp, the Penny Black, for the production of which the Jacob Perkins printing process was used to deter counterfeiting and forgery. The wrappers were printed and sold as a sheet of 12, with cutting the purchaser's task. Known as Mulready stationery, because the illustration was created by the respected artist William Mulready, the envelopes were withdrawn when the illustration was ridiculed and lampooned. Nevertheless, the public apparently saw the convenience of the wrappers being available ready-shaped, and it must have been obvious that with the stamp available totally plain versions of the wrapper could be produced and postage prepaid by purchasing a stamp and affixing it to the wrapper once folded and secured. In this way although the postage-prepaid printed pictorial version died ignominiously, the diamond-shaped wrapper acquired de facto official status and became readily available to the public notwithstanding the time taken to cut them out and the waste generated. With the issuing of the stamps and the operation and control of the service (which is a communications medium) in government hands the British model spread around the world and the diamond-shaped wrapper went with it.

Hill also installed his brother Edwin as The Controller of Stamps, and it was he with his partner Warren De La Rue who patented the machine for mass-producing the diamond-shaped sheets for conversion to envelopes in 1845. Today, envelope-making machine manufacture is a long- and well-established international industry, and blanks are produced with a short-arm-cross shape and a kite shape as well as diamond shape. (The short-arm-cross style is mostly encountered in "pocket" envelopes i.e. envelopes with the closing flap on a short side. The more common style, with the closing flap on a long side, are sometimes referred to as "standard" or "wallet" style for purposes of differentiation.)

Envelope-making machines at the Post Office Savings Bank, Blythe House, West Kensington, London

Machine Envelope Printer was one of the machine presses at the Bulaq Press. It present now in Bibliotheca Alexandrina

The most famous paper-making machine was the Fourdrinier machine. The process involves taking processed pulp stock and converting it to a continuous web which is gathered as a reel. Subsequently, the reel is guillotined edge to edge to create a large number of properly rectangular sheets because ever since the invention of Gutenberg's press paper has been closely associated with printing.

To this day, all other mechanical printing and duplicating equipments devised in the meantime, including the typewriter (which was used up to the 1990s for addressing envelopes), have been primarily designed to process rectangular sheets. Hence the large sheets are in turn are guillotined down to the sizes of rectangular sheet commonly used in the commercial printing industry, and nowadays to the sizes commonly used as feed-stock in office-grade computer printers, copiers and duplicators (mainly ISO, A4 and US Letter).

Using any mechanical printing equipment to print on envelopes, which although rectangular, are in fact folded sheets with differing thicknesses across their surfaces, calls for skill and attention on the part of the operator. In commercial printing the task of printing on machine-made envelopes is referred to as "overprinting" and is usually confined to the front of the envelope. If printing is required on all four flaps as well as the front, the process is referred to as "printing on the flat". Eye-catching illustrated envelopes or pictorial envelopes, the origins of which as an artistic genre can be attributed to the Mulready stationery – and which was printed in this way - are used extensively for direct mail. In this respect, direct mail envelopes have a shared history with propaganda envelopes (or "covers") as they are called by philatelists.

At the end of the 20th century, in 1998, the digital printing revolution delivered another benefit for small businesses when the U.S. Postal Service became the first postal authority to approve the introduction of a system of applying to an envelope in the printer bin of a PC sheet printer a digital frank or stamp delivered via the Internet. With this innovative alternative to an adhesive-backed postage stamp as the basis for an Electronic Stamp Distribution (ESD) service, a business envelope could be produced in-house, addressed and customized with advertising information on the face, and ready to be mailed.

Mail envelope certified by PHLPost

The fortunes of the commercial envelope manufacturing industry and the postal service go hand in hand, and both link to the printing industry and the mechanized envelope processing industry producing equipment such as franking and addressing machines. They are all four symbiotic: technological developments affecting one obviously ricochet through the others: addressing machines print addresses, postage stamps are a print product, franking machines imprint a frank on an envelope. If fewer envelopes are required; fewer stamps are required; fewer franking machines are required and fewer addressing machines are required. For example, the advent and adoption of information-based indicia (IBI) (commonly referred to as digitally-encoded electronic stamps or digital indicia) by the US Postal Service in 1998 caused widespread consternation in the franking machine industry, as their equipments were effectively rendered obsolescent and resulted in a flurry of lawsuits involving Pitney Bowes among others. The advent of e-mail in the late 1990s appeared to offer a substantial threat to the postal service. By 2008 letter-post service operators were reporting significantly smaller volumes of letter-post, specifically stamped envelopes, which they attributed mainly to replacement by e-mail. Although a corresponding reduction in the volume of envelopes required would have been expected, no such decrease was reported as widely as the reduction in letter-post volumes.

Although, with regards to e-mail developments, there is a substantial threat of "technology replacing tradition". This is offset by the equal reasoning that the Universal Postal Union is an international specialised agency of the United Nations, and a source of revenue for the government. Consequently, any deterioration of domestic and international postal services attended by loss of revenue is a matter of governmental concern.

Windowed envelope

A windowed envelope is an envelope with a plastic or glassine window in it. The plastic in these envelopes creates problems in paper recycling.

Security envelopes have special tamper-resistant and tamper-evident features. They are used for high value products and documents as well as for evidence for legal proceedings.

Some security envelopes have a patterned tint printed on the inside, which makes it difficult to read the contents. Various patterns exist.[12]

Paperboard mailing envelope showing PSA adhesive with release liner and with tear tape

Closed mailer being opened by pulling tear tape

Some envelopes are available for full-size documents or for other items. Some carriers have large mailing envelopes for their express services. Other similar envelopes are available at stationery supply locations.

These mailers usually have an opening on an end with a flap that can be attached by gummed adhesive, integral pressure-sensitive adhesive, adhesive tape, or security tape. Construction is usually:

• Paperboard
• Corrugated fiberboard
• Polyethylene, often a coextrusion
• Nonwoven fabric

Shipping envelopes can have padding to provide stiffness and some degree of cushioning. The padding can be ground newsprint, plastic foam sheets, or bubble packing.

Various U.S. Federal Government offices use Standard Form (SF) 65 Government Messenger Envelopes for inter-office mail delivery. These envelopes are typically light brown in color and un-sealed with string-tied closure method and an array of holes throughout both sides such that it is somewhat visible what the envelope contains. Other colloquial names for this envelope include "Holey Joe" and "Shotgun" envelope due to the holey nature of the envelope. Address method is unique in that these envelopes are re-usable and the previous address is crossed out thoroughly and the new addressee (name, building, room, and mailstop) is written in the next available box. Although still in use, SF-65 is no longer listed on the United States Office of Personnel Management website list of standard forms.[13]