Is Hand Cancelling Worth It

Guests absolutely do not care at all. The only issue would be if they are thick and cant go through the machine. Even if they can fit, sometimes the wax seals will get smushed/melted/torn. I sent regular mail with wax seals for our STDs and a few of them with a thicker seal didnt look great when received but tbh no one really cares about the envelope haha

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Thanks! That's what I figured. If a guests feels strongly about it I can hand deliver a new one to them. The appearance is really more for me and for pictures.

I did just receive an invite in the mail that was not hand cancelled and included a wax seal. While I wasn't bothered by it, I felt for the bride for spending the money on the seals and then them arriving damaged. So I personally would hand cancel if I'm putting the money and effort into wax seals.

Confession: I'd never heard the phrase hand cancelling until today! I didn't know it was possible to do such a thing. As far as I know, we didn't have any problems with damages, and if there were, no one told us about them.

I will be asking the post office to hand cancel! I’m the ‘obsessed with the overall presentation and first impression of the invites’ one!

The post office charges extra now for hand cancelling which often looks like an additional stamp at a few cents extra each. I paid for a grey bunny sticker (next to my selected Love stamp) just so I can have my faux "Let's Party" adhesive wax seal on my invite. The postal worker helped me put on the bunnies, but not as delicately as I would have liked. I think only 1 invite got lost perhaps from sticking together.

Ps. For regular mailing, the USPS does not want return addresses on the back anymore due to new machines.

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That's good to know about return addresses. Thanks!

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Good point.

Honestly i don't think most people would care, or even notice. Do whatever works best for you and your time though!

We had our invitations hand cancelled. Was it worth it? Probably not, since most guests typically throw away the envelope immediately. It was mostly something that my mom wanted us to do since we had fancy envelopes. She took them to the post office and handled everything. As a guest, I typically don't notice these things.

As a guest, I couldn’t care less about hand canceling. It’s part of the risk that is taken when something is not hand delivered. The things I have noticed as a guest that no one mentions or they say is not an issue is print at home labels or printing at home onto the envelopes rarely comes out cleanly by the time it reaches guests, if they receive them at all.


My family was invited on a couple occasions to wedding la for distant relatives when I was younger when the trend of DIY mass labels first came into being. In addition to looking like a corporate mass mailing, they were so smeared by the elements that you could barely read the envelope when it arrived. Others much closer to the couples never received any for the same reason. Based on those experiences, we will not do any at home printing or use labels.