International Medical Corps spices up marketing mail with fake postmarks

Here in the United States, it’s quite common to see no postmarks at all on envelopes mailed with Nonprofit Organization stamps. It’s somewhat less common to see mailer’s postmarks cancelling the stamps.

But fake postmarks on such an envelope? I can’t recall ever seeing such a thing until this week when my daughter pulled this piece of mail from the International Medical Corps from our post office box.

As you can see, the “postmarks” are in the right area, but they don’t extend onto the stamp because they’re printed directly on the envelope.

Want to know something even more bizarre? I’m not authority on French postal markings, but the lower of the two “cancellations”—the one with legible letters—appears to be from France’s Bouches-du-Rhône department. I don’t know if the choice of a foreign postmark was designed to avoid trouble with the USPS—it’s not a fake US postmark, after all—or just made at random.

Either way, this is one of the more interesting pieces of marketing mail I’ve seen in a long time.

Published 2026-03-21