You have arrived looking for DD Form 285. Before you download, confirm this is the right document: Appointment of Military Postal Clerk, Unit Mail Clerk or Mail Orderly. Full title: DD Form 285, Appointment of Military Postal Clerk, Unit Mail Clerk or Mail Orderly, June 1967.
Next, check the edition. You want not stated, currently carried as not stated by the publisher. Then confirm the form applies to you — this is a Department of Defense form, so you use it whether you serve in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Space Force or Coast Guard under Defense jurisdiction.
Then settle the schedule. You are working under not stated, with not stated responsible for the document, and your organization layers its own deadlines on that. Ask before you assume a date.
Finally, decide how you will complete it. You can type into a fillable file or print a blank and write by hand, and the rest of this page walks you through both paths in order.
Start at the header. Complete your identification before anything else, then work through the main entries, then finish at the certification. Skipping around causes contradictions between the top of the form and the bottom.
Before your first entry, look at the corner of the page and compare the printed date with not stated. If they do not match, stop and download again. Old copies circulate in shared drives for years, and a DD form is revised centrally for every service at once, so a superseded blank may not carry the fields your reviewer expects.
Fill every box as you come to it. If an item does not apply, enter N/A — an empty field looks like an oversight, and the form comes back to you. Watch the date fields especially: use the format the form specifies, not your habitual one.
Do not skip past the Privacy Act Statement. It is placed ahead of the personal data fields on purpose: it explains under what authority you are being asked, what happens to the information, and what follows if you decline. Take the minute it costs.
Sign only after every other entry is complete. Use ink on a printed copy, or a credentialed digital signature — CAC-based, in a reader that handles it — on an electronic one. A typed name satisfies neither method. Enter the date next to it before you close the file.
Review before you submit. Look for a superseded edition, blank mandatory fields, illegible writing, dates in the wrong format, and an unsigned or undated certification.
For questions about a specific entry, check the form's own instructions, and if that does not settle it, open not stated. The directive controls where they differ.
Download the form
First, look at what you can download. The set covers PDF, the form runs 2 pages, and you will complete roughly 152 fields.
You will not be charged for any of these; the whole set is free. Before you start entering data, save the file to your computer and open it there. Fields behave far more reliably in a desktop reader than in a browser preview.
What the form asks for
- Mark X if for all personal mail.
- Mark X if personal (except accountable).
- Mark X if official (all).
- Mark X if official (except accountable).
- Mark X if official pouches only.
- Mark X if other.
- Personal (all). Initial if applicable.
- Initial if official (except accountable).
- Initial if personal (except accountable).
- Initial if official pouches only.
- Initial if official (all).
- Specify and initial other.
- 1. Effective date.
- 2. Date revoked.
- 3. Name of appointee (last, first, middle initial).
- 4. Rank or grade.
- 6. Title of appointee.
- 7. Organization/activity.
- 8. A P O , M P O , or C O N U S installation.
- 9. Mail authorized to receive. Mark X if for all personal mail.
- Mark X if personal (except accountable).
- Mark X if official (all).
- Mark X if official (except accountable).
- Mark X if official pouches only.
Now that it is complete, send it where not stated or your local procedure says it goes. Before you do, make yourself a copy — scan it or save the file elsewhere. It costs you nothing and saves you the whole exercise if the original goes missing.
When DD Form 285 references another form, search on the series and number. Because DD numbers are common to every military department, the number by itself identifies exactly one document.
Here is where people go wrong. They see a number in an instruction and download whichever form matches it. But DA and DD are separate systems — Army-specific in one case, Department-wide under not stated in the other — so check which series you were sent to before you take the file.
Come back and check the edition next time you need this form. Editions change when the prescribing directive is reissued, when the information collected changes, or when the required notice language is updated, and none of those events reaches you directly. Verifying not stated at the moment you download is the whole defence.
Finally, understand the limits of what you have read. This page distributes a published Department of Defense form and describes how to fill it out. It does not give legal or procedural advice, and it cannot promise any outcome for your particular case. For that, contact not stated, your administrative office, or the authority identified in not stated.
Questions and answers
- What is DD Form 285?
- DD Form 285, Appointment of Military Postal Clerk, Unit Mail Clerk or Mail Orderly, June 1967
- Which edition is current?
- Not stated by the publisher
- Who is responsible for this form?
- Not stated
- In which formats can it be downloaded?