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Treat DD Form 499 as Department-level, which changes how you look for it. Title: Prisoner's Mail and Correspondence Record. Function: Prisoner's Mail and Correspondence Record. Because the number carries DD rather than a service prefix, the same edition covers all military departments and the defense agencies at once. Nobody issues a Navy copy or an Air Force copy.
Requirement traces to not stated; the form belongs to not stated. Everything about schedule sits below that in local instruction, which is where to ask if a date matters.
Current edition is not stated, carried as not stated. Check that against any copy you already hold before doing anything else — Department-level revisions land everywhere simultaneously, so a stale file is stale across the whole Department.
Available: PDF, across unknown pages, roughly unknown fields. That is the whole scope of the download decision.
Default to fillable pdf, print only when you must. The fillable file stores what you type; the printable file is a blank picture. A Department form often travels further than a service form — scanned, emailed, forwarded to an agency that never saw the original — and typed text is what survives that.
Edition check comes first, ahead of any entry. Compare the printed date to not stated and replace anything older. Department-level supersession is simultaneous across the services, so a superseded blank is not merely out of date locally; the office receiving it is already working from the new field structure whichever branch it belongs to.
Fill top to bottom. Identification, then substance, then certification — lower fields commonly derive from the header, and completing out of order produces internal contradictions a reviewer will catch.
Complete every field, N/A where an item does not apply, dates exactly as the form prescribes. A DD form crosses service lines, and a convention obvious in one branch is not obvious in the next.
The Privacy Act Statement precedes the personal data fields for a reason. It gives the collection authority, the principal purpose, the routine uses and whether disclosure is voluntary or mandatory. Read it while the disclosure decision is still yours to make.
Certification closes the form. Ink on paper, or a digital signature — normally CAC-applied — in software that supports it. Typed text in the signature box is a name, not an execution. Enter the date beside it before closing the file.
Check before submitting. The recurring failures are edition mismatch, gaps in required boxes, unreadable scanned handwriting, wrong date format, and certification without signature or date. Field-level questions go to the printed instructions, then to not stated, which is authoritative.
Send it as not stated or local guidance specifies. Save a copy. Cross-service and cross-agency routing is normal for Department forms, and a lost original outside your own organization is harder to chase down.
Related forms are found by number alone. The DD sequence is one unified Department-wide series, so a cited number resolves to exactly one document with no branch qualifier needed.
Do not read across from a service number. DA numbering is Army-specific under an Army proponent; DD numbering is Department-wide under not stated or an equivalent Department office. The sequences are unrelated, so identical digits in each identify two different documents. Read the prefix, not the digits.
Three drivers of revision: directive reissue, altered collection requirements, updated statutory notice text. No notification accompanies any of them, so download fresh and confirm not stated rather than reusing an archived file.
Limits of this page: it distributes a published Department of Defense document and describes it. No legal advice, no procedural ruling, no statement about whether any submission will be accepted. Applicability, eligibility and procedure belong to not stated, to a servicing personnel office, or to the office named in not stated.
Questions and answers
- What is DD Form 499?
- Prisoner's Mail and Correspondence Record
- Which edition is current?
- Not stated by the publisher
- Who is responsible for this form?
- Not stated
- In which formats can it be downloaded?