According to our local Post Office, you may not ship something Media Mail if it contains advertising. To me, advertising would be for a current product. Old trapping supply catalogs where the prices are obsolete are not advertising in my mind, but yet the Post Office claims it doesn't matter, Before I retired the Post Office where I worked said it was okay for me to mail catalogs and magazines Media Mail if they were old and the advertising was obsolete. The Post Office where I live says I may not mail those items Media Mail. A couple years ago I purchased a bunch of magazines and the seller mailed them Media Mail. I got a note in my mail box the local Post Office was holding the package for postage due. The postage due amount was almost as much as the magazines cost me, I contacted the seller and he agreed to pay the postage due amount. If he would not have paid it, I wasn't going to pick up the magazines. Before that and since that I received shipments of items that were sent Media Mail without a problem. Not sure why the Post Office decided to open that one shipment and check it out. Has anyone else experienced anything like that?

The variances I've seen depend on who is working the window...very hard to know what is what; and I suspect that, as with most Govt. charges, the more you ask, the higher the prince....

Sorry, opinion only, and worth twice the price!!

They don’t have the man power to inspect ever package, so it is random. It was your lucky day.

The no advertising is not cut and dry. There are certain exceptions- many paperback books, at least the older ones, have a couple of pages in the back promoting other books by that author or publisher. That advertising is allowed and those books can go media mail.

It pays to read the actual printed regulations and not go by what some employee says.

They find a lot of ways to not do the job those rule make it easier.

I box the stuff up, tell them media mail and off it goes, never received a nastygram yet...

Me too, older than a year is an antique, and the advertising is moot.