This postcard was from Lithuania. Luckily he posted an original picture.
USPS does not print orange barcodes, theirs are black.
I notice they print black codes on the message side and faint orange ones on the picture side. It easily blends in with darker coloured cards but noticeable on whites. Here is one of mine:
Yes, that’s what I’m talking about 
i work for our postal service and we are instructed to cancel stamps with a slash from a pen if they miss cancellation. just an fyi! THAT being said—i send out my cards through the cases where mail is hand sorted and hand cancel them myself! a lucky little perk!
What’s that good for?
Thanks for letting me know! I thought the orange ones are from other postal services.
It seems that the orange barcode is an identifier that the address needs to be read by a human. Here’s what I found on the internet:
“The barcode you describe is sprayed onto the piece of mail when the
automated sorting equipment cannot decipher the address. It is an
internal identifier for the piece that corresponds to an image of the
address that a human will read to assign the correct ZIP. The code
does contain other purely internal information such as the machine
number and timestamp.”
@b94new
That’s certainly a perk! Could I ask for HAND STAMPED on the envelope to avoid slashing ? 
I have started sending out more cards in envelopes since I find it easier to print long/complicated addresses and non-Latin scripts on an envelope through the printer. But after reading this it might become my default except when people specifically ask.
As for cards I receive, I seem to get damage in waves. I will have weeks where every card will have at least some kind of damage of the picture, then cards will be ok again for a while. It is kind of disheartening.
Really you’d have to ask up the sender to take it to the postal window to have a handstamped. Everything goes through the machines otherwise because almost all our mail sorting is automated
That ist interesting! Thank you very much for looking it up!
You can ask for a hand cancel but as former USPS I can tell you it is often an exercise in futility. Even when I cancelled my own mail the plant sometimes would just dump it in with the stuff to be machine cancelled. Even if I tagged the bundle.
The other problem is a lot of clerks won’t do it PERIOD. My office was the outlier in that we did so on request if the amount was reasonable but as I said before the distribution center often ignored the tags.
SOOO…. You can try asking at the counter. You might get lucky. Our trashy postmarks are one of my pet peeves too.
I recently received a card from China that HAD proper cancellations and then someone went ahead and drew a black permanent marker across the stamps as well. Ugh.
I have received one and it was damaged.
Just FYI, in the U.S. the current price for a postcard stamp is 36 cents, but a stamp on an enveloped piece of mail is 55 cents. By July 2021 the enveloped (“first-class”) mail stamp goes up to 58 cents.
That is true for domestic mail only. The international rate is $1.20 ($1.30 at the end of August) for both letters and postcards.
Oops! I’m a newbie & didn’t realize that! That was helpful (for me, anyway) 
Even though they are damaged, I don’t want to received them in envelope. Written and stamped is still the best choice.
