Overview

Mass deletion capabilities within Lob allow you to programmatically cancel mail at scale. It is important to have a structure in place to delete mail en masse in the event that users wrongly trigger campaigns to be sent off. Mass deletion involves deleting a large amount of mail items automatically using a specific commonality (for the purpose of this guide, a batch_id, that groups mail pieces by campaign).

Prerequisites

• Create a Lob account and acquire API key
• A large number of mail pieces needing to be canceled quickly
• The mail pieces have not been sent to printers

What is mass deletion?

Mass deletion allows the user to cancel large amounts of mail at a single time without canceling all of their outgoing mail. In order to execute a mass deletion, you need a way to identify each individual mail piece that belongs to a campaign. This article shows how to leverage Lob’s metadata property for mass deletion or how to manage mail campaign information with your own infrastructure. Both approaches individually or combined make it easy to cancel all of the mail in reference to a campaign that was released too early or had a mistake in the copy.

Why is mass deletion important?

Oftentimes, users are working on multiple campaigns at one time. One campaign will be set to go out in the near future, and others are staggered for further dates. Sometimes, campaigns that should be going out in the future are accidentally scheduled to be released in the present. When this occurs, it is vital to react fast, so that undesired mail is not sent out because once a mail piece is sent, there is no way to take it out of the mail stream. A campaign may contain thousands of pieces of individual mail and there is no way to manually remove them all in time.  Additionally, you do not want to have to stop ALL of your outgoing mail streams at once due to one mistake. Implementing a mass delete functionality allows users to cancel all of the data in that campaign quickly before it goes to the printer, thereby preventing the user from being charged, and stopping the mail from going out to their customers too early.

Use Lob metadata

The recommended approach for identifying batches of mail sent through Lob is to use the metadata property with a unique key-value pair. Below is an example of how to create a single mail piece that includes metadata with a batch_id set to “NEWYORK2022”. The batch_id can be anything you want as long as it is unique to the batch, is a maximum length of 500 characters and is used for all mail pieces in the batch.

Create a config using your LOB_API_KEY found in the Lob dashboard. Find more on idempotency keys here.

In order to delete all postcards from the NEWYORK2022 campaign, use the list function and pass a metadata object with a batch_id key set to NEWYORK2022. This returns a list of all NEWYORK2022 campaign postcards, loop over each one and pass the postcard id into the cancel function.

To see the full list of acceptable parameters in the list, visit the docs.

Utilize your own infrastructure

If you plan to save details about individual mail pieces in your database, consider including an identifier for the campaign as well. In the example below, we create a new postcard and upon successful completion, we store details in our database.

Create a config using your LOB_API_KEY found in the lob dashboard. Note: For extra resiliency, you can pass in the batch id via metadata (see above example), as well as store it locally as seen below.

To mass delete, we fetch a list of mail pieces from our database using a unique id for our campaign and loop over all the mail pieces to cancel them.

Conclusion

In this article, you have learned how to add metadata to mail pieces. Using this metadata you can fetch a list of related mail pieces and delete them en masse. With these code snippets, you can ensure that accidentally triggering a mail campaign early does not cost you money, time, or customers.

Further resources

• API reference docs
• Use case guide for NCOA