Digitally preview incoming USPS mail and packages

I tried signing up for this 3 months ago, and was shocked to receive images for the mail of literally <i>everyone</i> in my building (I&#x27;m one of seven apartments).<p><i>Huuuge</i> privacy violation. (It&#x27;s just images of the envelopes, but that still tells you a lot.)<p>I unsubscribed and then went to file feedback, and got an immediate reply explaining this was <i>by design</i>:<p>&gt; <i>Thank you for participating in Informed Delivery®. You recently reported that you are receiving images for other units in your apartment complex. This is due to the fact that your unit&#x2F;complex is not coded down to a unique delivery point barcode, which is a requirement for this service.</i><p>&gt; <i>In order for the feature to provide mail images to the appropriate recipient(s), each multi-unit building on each carrier route must be individually identified and coded to the unit level. While most addresses are coded at this level, this coding process, especially in high density areas, is a work in progress. If you live in multi-unit building and you have successfully registered on usps.com ®, but the sign up process indicates that you do not have an eligible address, we are unable to offer you the feature until the coding is complete. Please check back at a later date.</i><p>It seems insane that if my building isn&#x27;t &quot;coded&quot; I see <i>everyone&#x27;s</i> mail instead of nobody&#x27;s.<p>And it&#x27;s not like I&#x27;m in the middle of nowhere -- I&#x27;m in Brooklyn, half a block away from an express train stop. And the post office knows about our different addresses -- I mean, they deliver mail directly into our individual locked mailboxes.

This issue is a privacy &#x2F; security nightmare.<p>I had my mail forwarded to my colleague while I was traveling for business for 2 months. Signed up for informed delivery with his address but my name (that&#x27;s how I was forwarding mail).<p>Not only did I not have to verify that I live at that address and hence started receiving emails with images of my incoming mail, but I also received images for his and his wife&#x27;s mail.<p>Trying to set up informed delivery for my address required some sort of in person address verification which I didn&#x27;t feel like completing, but the emails with scans of incoming mail still are sent to me daily (which is all I needed anyway). Very concerning how anyone could easily observe my mail this way.<p>By the way, it seems that address verification is only required to access some sort of dashboard, but this doesn&#x27;t prevent the emails with images of incoming mail to be sent.

Worth remembering five years ago there was a startup (Outbox) trying to work with the USPS on this with some disruptive features (spam mail removal). USPS killed it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.insidesources.com&#x2F;outbox-vs-usps-how-the-post-office-killed-digital-mail&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.insidesources.com&#x2F;outbox-vs-usps-how-the-post-of...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7667068" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7667068</a><p>Outbox&#x27;s shutdown note: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20140712084627&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.outboxmail.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;74086768959&#x2F;outbox-is-shutting-down-a-note-of-gratitude" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20140712084627&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.outbox...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7097892" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7097892</a>

This has been great for deciding if I want to walk out to the mailbox in the winter or not. But I believe signing up for this caused me to get a ton of junk mail.<p>There is something about either forwarding&#x2F;address changing or this informed delivery that allows USPS to sell your new address to junk mailers. I signed up for both at the same time and was flooded with new junk mail the day I moved in. It gives me a serious distaste for the postal service as an organization.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;krebsonsecurity.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;11&#x2F;u-s-secret-service-warns-id-thieves-are-abusing-uspss-mail-scanning-service&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;krebsonsecurity.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;11&#x2F;u-s-secret-service-warns...</a>

If you sell your house, USPS has no way to know and they keep sending you the emails for your old residence.<p>So now there&#x27;s no way when you move into a new residence of knowing whether someone else is snooping on your email.

I had this back when I lived in Chicago a number of years ago.<p>Unfortunately, I still have it even though I&#x27;ve moved away so now I get to preview someone else&#x27;s mail.<p>The last few times I tried to unsubscribe, the USPS web site was not working properly, so I just roundfile the incoming messages.

You mean to tell me I can get a daily spam message showing me previews of all the spam coming to my physical inbox?

This feature is great. See a grayscale scale image of the envelopes and packages being delivered to your house everyday.

The glaring issue with informed delivery is it&#x27;s fairly easy for someone to sign up on someone else&#x27;s address. There are even reports of people supposedly using it on the home office addresses of lawyers involved in M&amp;A.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;krebsonsecurity.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;10&#x2F;usps-informed-delivery-is-stalkers-dream&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;krebsonsecurity.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;10&#x2F;usps-informed-delivery-i...</a><p>USPS really dropped the ball on this one.

If only you could run a spam filter on the images and have the junk mail rerouted direct to recycling.<p><i>USPS RecycleDirect™</i>

I would love if this would let me flag something and automatically return to sender. I&#x27;ve lived in a rental for a year now and I still get more mail for other people than I do for myself.

Been using this for a few months, it&#x27;s pretty cool. Especially helpful as a contractor when it&#x27;s helpful to know if that late check is going to be arriving later in the day or if you should hound the client again.

Wasn&#x27;t there a similar thread on HN a couple months ago about this? I remember commenting about the privacy issues, etc. and was told that USPS is really taking digital images of all the mail, and this is simply offering that as a service. There was a link to support that comment as well.<p>That is, if you&#x27;re concern about your gov monitoring your mail, that genie is out of the bottle and ain&#x27;t never going back.

Outside of the (valid) privacy concerns, I use this and considered it an awesome tool. Then I ran into the good old efficiency and effort of the USPS we all know and love... I was expecting a rather important document from the government, so when the image of it showed up in my Informed Delivery email, I knew to go to the mailbox that day, but the letter never arrived. Instructions on the USPS site tell you that even though you see an image of the mail piece, it might not arrive for up to +7 days later and they ask you to wait the full 7 days before declaring your mail missing - there is a feature where you click on a link to report a specific piece of mail as not delivered. So I wait exactly 7 days and what do you know, the link to report that letter is expired. They expire the damn link 7 days after the email is sent, which means if you follow directions you are sent into a literal black hole because apparently no one on the team tested for obvious logical conflicts. The letter never arrived and my report on this glaring flaw was never responded to.

I signed up for it when living at my old apartment. When I moved out of the apartment, I somehow got locked out of my USPS account so I could not update the settings to indicate that I had moved out. So now everyday I get an e-mail showing the incoming USPS mail of the person currently living at my old apartment.

I highly recommend a service like virtualpostmail (there&#x27;s a few, but this is the one I use). They&#x27;re a commercial mail receiving service. You get a new address (like a PO, but deliverable by everyone -- though this gets tricky with credit card billing addresses). Once mail gets delivered, you get a scan of the front side. Then you can choose to have it shredded, scanned to PDF or delivered to you.<p>This is great for a lot of reasons: (1) Americans move an average of 12 times in their lives, and changing addresses is a huge PITA. This gives you a forever-mailing-address (well, as long as you keep paying). (2) Practically never deal with physical letter mail again, just PDFs (3) If you get that once in a blue moon letter you actually want, they&#x27;ll just mail it to you.<p>Not free, but IMO worth every penny.

This is still a security concern.<p>I live in a building in NYC with a shared mailbox for both apartments. I can see every piece of mail my neighbor gets.<p>Granted, I see this when I open the mailbox, but having a digital record of it in inherently insecure email is a bit concerning.

My only complaint is you need a separate account for each address. (So if you have a PO box and a residence, you need to sign up for 2 separate USPS.com accounts to get informed delivery for both)

I redirected these to my spam box after at least 60% of the e-mails I received had no image and the text &quot;A piece of mail that we do not have for is included in today&#x27;s mail&quot;.

I recently moved and found out about this when I signed up for the change of address and mail forwarding. It works well for me. I get daily emails with photos of what&#x27;s coming. The image sizes are small but still clear - which is good because that keeps the email size to a very small level, even on days with a lot of mail. There&#x27;s some things that don&#x27;t have images for some unknown reason, but overall it works well for me and I&#x27;m impressed with the service.

The recommendation I&#x27;ve seen about how to deal with the potential privacy&#x2F;security implications is to sign up for it even if you don&#x27;t use it. This lets you &quot;park&quot; your address, so you&#x27;re notified of any changes or if anyone tries to sign up for your address maliciously.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;krebsonsecurity.com&#x2F;tag&#x2F;informed-delivery&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;krebsonsecurity.com&#x2F;tag&#x2F;informed-delivery&#x2F;</a>

Seems like it should be more useful than it is. I unsubbed after 3 months. Seeing an envelope didn&#x27;t really give me much info as a consumer. Perhaps on a long trip or something, it would be more useful.<p>Now, if I could have selected things to trash immediately to reduce the waste, or if the entire message could have been digitized... well, that would be helpful. Companies have come and gone offering services like this, but no one has gotten it quite right for now.

I love this service, though it has a sometimes disappointingly high number of pieces of mail for which no picture is available.<p>Anyway, as I&#x27;m currently out of the country I can view the mail sent to my family&#x27;s address which now serves as my US mail address, though I definitely understand how this would be a privacy concern if you have multiple &quot;households&quot; at the same address.

off topic: Is there some service by USPS where I can have a P.O. Box, but have my mail forwarded to any address?<p>I find myself having to move a lot, and trying to keep track of all the addresses I need to update is challenging for myself. I&#x27;d love to have a service where I can send my mail and only make an address change on that service when I need to update my mailing address.

I love this service for the parcel data, for pretty much the same reasons as the UPS and FedEx equivalents. It means I actually know what parcels are headed my way, regardless of whether or not someone explicitly gave me a tracking number. Makes it much easier to know when I&#x27;m getting something.

One annoying limitation (at least when I signed up) is that a given USPS.com account can only manage it for one mailbox. If you have more than one mailbox, such as the mailbox in front of your house and a separate PO box, you need to have two separate USPS.com accounts.

I&#x27;ve used the beta for a year, it&#x27;s pretty good but there&#x27;s a few bugs. And it adds anxiety because now I&#x27;m aware of letters that didn&#x27;t arrive then show up later. Before i wouldn&#x27;t have thought about it. I save the email until i get it.

That’s great, can they now stop selling my mailbox space to advertisers. Incredibly annoying - many government services make it basically mandatory to have a mailing address, and there is now way to stop pounds of junk that land into it on daily basis.

I have been using it for past 8 months. It is very useful service and worked most of the time. I did get couple of times the scans of other people mails but mostly its great. I did find some missing packages once because of local mail delivery mishap.

I signed up for this after moving out of my apartment and temporarily set up forwarding to my a freind’s address. It’s a great service, though I realized no confirmation was needed for me to start getting this info.

Product idea: Image classification for incoming mail to set alerts when you are sent certain mail... Some things that come to mind: bills, jury duty, speed camera tickets... etc.<p>Anyone interested in working on this? LMK

Nice - I signed up for it and I&#x27;m seeing images of mail being sent to my previous address (that&#x27;s actually addressed to the current occupants, not my mail being mis-delivered).

Of course, if you don&#x27;t sign up, make sure you DO opt out of Informed Delivery. Otherwise someone else may sign up and get copies of all your mail sent to them without your knowledge.

Kramer had the right idea. I want out of this mail thing, entirely.

Been looking for a way to get USPS physical mail notifications. Worst case scenario everybody will see that I get utility bills just like everyone else.

Have been using this service for over a year. Seems to be pretty insecure from stories I have read but I appreciate the convenience.

I had to disable this because of the sheer volume of email I started getting from USPS.

Ahh... the feel when you convert your warrantless mass surveillance program ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mail_Isolation_Control_and_Tracking" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mail_Isolation_Control_and_Tra...</a> ) into a consumer value add.

Why though?

Monetization of the surveillance program they long had in place? Not bad.

Can I just have all of my mail emailed to me? That&#x27;d be great.

I have being using this for a while. It&#x27;s quite nice.

Can multiple people at the same address sign up for this?

Been using this for over a year.<p>It&#x27;s so spotty it&#x27;s useless.

I have been using virtualpostmail.com to scan my mail. Much better.

Sounds like USPS is joining the panopticon-purveying surveillance capitalism game. &quot;It&#x27;s only metadata...&quot;

Hey at least the government will have copies of ll your mail now too.

I wanted to use this to finally PROVE that I mailed xyz content and not simply that receipt was signed for a box.<p>But NO, they don’t get it and only scan the outside.<p>Is there a service that will actually print the stuff I email and mail it?