I would pay for this, at times. All of my mail is delivered to my box at a post office about 15 minutes from my home. I normally only check it once every week or two. When I'm expecting something important, however, I may make a trip there once a day for a few days in a row until it arrives.<p>I wouldn't pay for it all the time as 98% of what I receive isn't really "time-sensitive" or all that important (mostly it's just bills that I pay online anyways), but for those times like I mentioned above I'd gladly pay a few bucks for the service.<p>Of course, since it's not unusual for me to end up with other people's mail in my mailbox, I'm expecting there to be some "privacy violations" that come out of this as well.
I've had pretty much all my mail <i>contents</i> scanned for me since 1999. It's a great service - I can go anywhere in the world, and never worry about a bill, or a charge, or change in terms of services that get mailed to me. Plus, they'll forward any "hard items" (like credit cards) to a physical mailbox (which, in my case, is a pobox that will forward anything that arrives to whatever address I happen to be in the world.)<p>So - all my mail goes to Sioux Falls South Dakota, which then gets scanned (and presumably shredded), and then hard items are re-mailed to Mountain View, which then, on a monthly basis or so, get re-mailed again to Singapore (where I currently am).<p>It only took the USPS 16 years to offer the scan/email service for the <i>envelope</i> - it will be interesting to see when they'll scan/email the <i>contents</i>.
There was a startup called Outbox awhile back that was trying to be a proxy service for physical mail- have your mail forwarded to them (or maybe they picked it up manually?) and they digitized it for you. This idea from USPS isn't quite that but a good step in the right direction. Super handy for more transient urban millennials at least.
The Swiss post office calls this service "E-Post office": <a href="https://www.post.ch/en/private/receiving-mail/private-specify-receipt-location/e-post-office" rel="nofollow">https://www.post.ch/en/private/receiving-mail/private-specif...</a><p>I've never tried it, but the descriptions sounds great: You receive a notification whenever you get a letter and can then decide, whether to get the letter physically delivered or opened & scanned. With automatic filtering for later letters from the same address.
It should cost almost nothing to implement as they already doing it for law enforcement anyway. And it is also an indirect method for them of informing the general public that they have the capacity of doing it and therefore it must not come to a surprise if it is also forwarded @fbi. Maybe in their mind it's a way of declining moral responsibility for their spying. And likewise for federal governement as it is certainly endorsed (if not suggested) by them.
Digital postal mail:<p>* <a href="http://www.virtualpostmail.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.virtualpostmail.com/</a><p>* <a href="https://www.postscanmail.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.postscanmail.com/</a>
The link to sign up for Informed Delivery Notification just goes to the preferences page. I was only able to opt into My USPS (package tracking), as well as choose to receive communications from USPS.
There's a small part of me that feels as though this might've been something that should have happened maybe as early as 1990, but didn't, somehow.
Now if only you could look at the online envelope images and mark them "spam", "open and scan contents", or "deliver unopened".
A lot of business services companies, providing a registered address, etc, do this (for individuals, brass-plate overseas offices, or individuals that don't want their own address known). It costs around GBP 90 for a London (UK) registered address and unlimited mail forwarding (physical or scanned email).
Haha, this is what Jerry Seinfeld once jokingly proposed when he was mocking the postal service.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=xR1ckgXN8G0#t=300" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=xR...</a>
I would definitely pay for this if it replaced physical junk mail with scans. I'd pay even more if it just went ahead and deleted all junk mail. I'd pay a similar amount to...unsubscribe from junk mail.