Claim refunds on shipping labels you bought but never used

Every Monday at 8am, hunt down postage I paid for but never used and claim the money back. Start with EasyPost List Shipments to pull every label purchased in the last 30 days, paginating until you have the full set.

Before requesting anything, read the existing reclaim ledger in Google Sheets with Get Values. Any tracking code already recorded there as submitted or refunded is done, so drop it from this run. We must never double request a refund on the same label.

For each remaining label, check its tracker with EasyPost Retrieve Tracker, or use List Trackers to pull them in bulk when that is more efficient. The unused label signal is a tracker sitting at unknown or pre_transit with no scan events recorded, meaning the carrier never took possession. A tracker at in_transit or any status beyond it means the label was consumed, so it must never be refunded under any circumstances.

Use judgement about what a quiet tracker actually means. A label bought a few hours ago with no scan is almost certainly just waiting on the carrier's first scan, not an abandoned label. Respect a configurable grace period, default 5 days, measured from the label purchase date: nothing gets a refund request until it has been quiet for at least that long. If a carrier is known to be slow to post first scans, lean toward waiting rather than refunding a label that is genuinely in the network.

For each label that clears those checks, call EasyPost Refund Shipment. Read the refund_status that comes back, which can be submitted, refunded, rejected, or not_applicable. Treat these as genuinely different outcomes. Since 18 October 2025 USPS applies a 14 day hold before processing a refund on a never scanned label, so a request coming back as submitted rather than refunded is the normal case, not a failure. Record the pending state honestly and never report a submitted refund as money already recovered.

Log every outcome to the reclaim ledger in Google Sheets with Append Values, one row per label: purchase date, carrier, service level, tracking code, label cost, refund status, and the date the request was made. This ledger is what the next run reads to skip anything already handled, so write it even when the refund was rejected or not applicable.

Finish with Slack Bot Send a Message to the shipping ops channel summarizing the run: how many labels were submitted for refund, the total dollars now in flight, anything the carrier rejected along with the reason, and how much has actually settled. Keep the in flight total separate from the settled total so nobody counts the money twice.

USPS only accepts unused label refund requests within 30 days of the label being printed. Call out separately in the Slack summary any unused label that is approaching that cutoff, roughly 25 days old or more, and flag it as needing a person to chase before the window closes. That escalation list is the most time sensitive part of the message, so put it where it will not be missed.