In the French Post Office (La Poste), mail sequencing has until now been carried out by hand by individual postmen in each delivery office in France. For the last two years, La Poste has been equipping its mail sorting centres with videocoding systems and remote-OCR systems. Now, this equipment is able to encode the handwritten delivery line of the address. So, in 1996, the Research Center of La Poste (SRTP) designed an entirely new mail sequencing machine for delivery offices, called TABOU. Two prototypes of TABOU have been trialled during the past year in the delivery office of Sartrouville near Paris.