The Postal Operations Manual was intended to be an internal document, and copies were never regularly made available to the public. It was never included on the USPS public website, although several postal employee unions published editions on their website.

The Postal Operations Manual, Issue 1, was released on 5-15-79, and distributed to all post offices. Updates and Revisions to the POM were published as needed in the Postal Bulletin. Issues 2 through Issue 6 were incremental updates and applied to Issue 1. The date of Issue 2 is unknown, but it was mentioned in PB21220 (11-22-79). Regular printed edition updates were distributed to post offices on what appears to have been an annual basis.

No digital copies of the first five issues of the Postal Operations Manual are available at this time.

A digital copy of POM Issue 6 was located on the Hathi Trust website, but it is not verified that it was complete as no reference to Issue 2 is included. It is possible that the material in Issue 2 was replaced in a subsequent issue.

POM Issue 7 was another incremental update. The POM, Issue 8, released on 7-16-98, was a complete reissue of the POM. It was followed by at least one incremental update on 12-27-2001.

The Postal Operation Manual, Issue 9, was another complete update, the last one reported, and was published in July 2002. This was also the final printed edition. All subsequent updates were made electronically. Revisions and updates to materials included in the sections of the POM continued to be published in the Postal Bulletin.

Over the past decade, the compiler has harvested a number of these later PDF editions of the POM in their complete updated format, and those which are available are included here. Other editions which were digitized by the Google Books Project and Hathi-Trust have also been included here when available. This list is certainly not complete, and anyone who may have an edition not represented should contact the contributor through Stamp Smarter.

Each version of the POM is identified by the Issue number, and then a reference to the final update present in that edition.

Physical copies of this publication are also uncommon. Because of the ephemeral nature of the contents, when the new print editions were distributed, the previous editions were typically discarded.