USPS Informed Delivery – Digital Images of Front of Mailpieces
informeddelivery.usps.com
informeddelivery.usps.com
Any address that can't be machine-read (which is, like, 5%?) is sent via teh internet to some people sitting in a "cheap labor" place like WV where it is keyed in by a person.
Later, the typed results go back to the origin and a barcode is slapped on the letter. How do they find the right letter, you ask? Look for the florescent barcode at the back: that uniquely identifies the letter. So unreadable mail is scanned twice to get barcoded. After it's barcoded, the only human who looks at it is your delivery person.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegib...
It used to be in Barbados
- It's slightly depressing to come home to no new mail (I know, that's just a weird mental thing for me).
- More importantly, it helps keep the postal service afloat, something that I think is an important service.
-- It keeps a sizable chunk of U.S. government workers employed. Employed is good.
-- It acts as a proxy wellness check for elderly and rural citizens.
-- It lets Grandma cheaply send me a card and $20 for my birthday. Email and Venmo just doesn't cut it.
100% agree. I still enjoy getting the mail every day after I get home from work. I even find the junk mail interesting, in a "Why in the world did they send this to me?" type of way.
Couldn't that material be better put to use elsewhere?
In the grand scheme of annoyances that include telemarketers, throwing out some mail every day is pretty minor.
It does clog up my mailbox but since I swapped out for an extra-giant one that isn't really a problem any longer.
The bundle of grocery store ads that comes every Tuesday, I could do without. I don't shop at any of the included stores, but the bundle has such a mish-mash of odd sized circulars that I have to go through it since important mail gets mixed in frequently.
You send me spam, which goes directly in the recycle bin, a service that I pay for from my wallet - you need to pay up for the privilege.
If a piece of junk mail has a postage-paid return envelope included, take everything else, stuff it in there, and mail the whole thing back.
Doesn't pay your utility bill, but feels oh so righteous :)
1. give you a mailbox
2. scan outside of all incoming mail
3. allow you to select which ones to open
4. scan the contents
5. optionally forward items you need physical
6. dispose of everything else
My apartment, on a weekly basis, gets mail to roughly 3-5 previous inhabitants. As in, exact same address, etc.
Sometimes even bills from insurance companies or other important mail.
I think when you move you're supposed to notify USPS to forward mail to your new address (probably also inform important mailers of the move as well) but from what I've seen they don't propagate the address changes very well.
I mean, sure, those previous inhabitants may not have notified USPS at all, but I find that hard to believe.
Also a lot of junk mail will be addressed to the name "or current resident"
> sure, those previous inhabitants may not have notified USPS at all, but I find that hard to believe
I certainly wouldn't. Why would I notify the USPS that I moved? I would notify my contacts (or much more likely, they'd ask me for my address in the event they wanted to send me something). A delivery service is for delivering things to addresses, not to people.
A delivery service is for delivering things to people; addresses are just a tool for locating the perosn you are trying to get the thing delivered to.
If I have something mailed to me at my office, are you claiming the post office hasn't made a mistake when they deliver it to my home?
So, like, General Delivery?
> If I have something mailed to me at my office, are you claiming the post office hasn't made a mistake when they deliver it to my home?
There's a question of principal/agent there, so maybe, maybe not.
OTOH, I'll maintain that the post office is not making a mistake when it keeps delivering my mail from my employer to me at my actual address, even though they keep sending it to an address which resembles mine only in that the street name and zip code are the same, and two of the four numbers in the street address they use also appear (in different positions) in my actual address.
Which I suppose I should go talk to HR about again.
There is value in updating your address. Ideally, you won't need a year to get things sorted, but a couple of months is certainly valuable.
You're trying to invoke the fear that the only method of contacting your friend is to write to the last address you knew for them. That was true once; it has no particular relationship to the modern day.
Even when it was true, though, postal services were a system for delivering mail to places, not to people. If your friend moved and you didn't know that, it was difficult to contact them.
The company has gone through a lot of changes since then, for the better.
We'll have some exciting announcements in the coming months as well.
I have a PO box and as that address includes the post office address you would receive notification and pictures of ALL mail going to that address, so everyone's PO box. Not good.
Anyway, I set this up for my house and it has been working fine. I haven't gotten anything that wasn't intended for me (of course, I get stuff that's not intended for me in the REAL mail on a regular basis, so even if it happened here from time to time, it wouldn't be a big change).
Is Informed Delivery® available to PO Box® customers?
USPS® is looking to expand the service to PO Box customers in the future. PO Box customers in certain Post Offices nationwide can use our existing Real Mail Notification® service to receive a text-only message without images, via email or SMS message. Check with your local Post Office for more details.
All the images of the service are emailed to the user and are not secure.
[1] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/us/postal-service-conf...
But yes, always use USPS to ship to Canada.
http://www.theonion.com/article/butterfly-fuck-swing-filled-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/theopriestley/2015/12/08/usps-l...
Still, though, I would really like this service. I travel quite a bit and I would hate to miss important pieces of mail.
"Ultimately, management concluded that Outbox’s business model was flawed – a conclusion that the market appears to have affirmed."
"Part of the trick was that the service could automatically weed out junk mail, and when U.S. Postmaster General Pat Donahoe got wind of this, he wasn’t happy — at least according to Baehr."
"Donahoe summoned Outbox to his office, and Baehr made his pitch, arguing that the company was just a few smart guys with $2 million in financing who wanted to spend the next few years learning about Donahoe’s customers and even sending him data about what these customers needed. Donahoe responded by saying that the customers of U.S. Postal Service were not the general public. Its customers, he said, were a few hundred bulk mailers."
"After several months of testing and refining, we reasonably concluded that we were executing well and collecting good data—it told us that there wasn’t enough demand to support the cost model."
If they're storing them anyway, it probably makes sense that people should have access to stored information about them though.
Any notice from government offices comes this way. And usually the important notices are ones that weren't expected. :(
The picture of the envelope would give you more info on what it was, who sent it, etc, than the current green slips do.
This is the only way the IRS contacts you.
The USPS culture is anything but profit centric. Without violating the sanctity of the mails there could be creative ways to leverage the combined household and individual knowledge for profit.
But then when I thought there was no hope the USPS got the Amazon deal.
Threshold mail delivery is another concept that could be interrupted by a user request (based on mail information in the stream)
But it's not a profit organization and ideas are just fun to think about.
Separated spouses and private investigators will use this from the comfort of their home. (Of course one party will give permission)
I sent one support ticket in that went to an unmonitored inbox, then another that got a vague reply saying that there is nothing I can do about it.
What a mess.
see:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/business/seeking-revenue-p...
The US tax payers effectively subsidize an agency that delivers junk mail and there's nothing you can do to opt out of that junk mail if they buy those services from the USPS. Oh and the USPS still loses money doing it. I wish I could borrow from the Fed at 1.2%.
That said, I'd really like it to work because it would save me trips down to the post-office only to collect junk mail and the previous PO box tenants non-forwarded correspondence.
What is that "enhancing" exactly? An enhancement would be the option to not have something delivered to my mailbox at all because it is not important or is junk mail. Such an enhancement was provided by a startup called Outbox that the Post Master General put out of business because it was in conflict with the US Post Offices biggest "customer" the direct marketing industry. Outbox did many other things too like deposit checks for you and shred mail if you elected to do so.
see: https://www.forbes.com/sites/theopriestley/2015/12/08/usps-l...
After September 11th the Post Office began scanning all American's mail. So it sounds like someone got the bright idea to repurpose that invasion of privacy as an "enhancement."
Politicians, who are the benefactors of the low priced mailers, and who have an interest in preserving the few no college required jobs left, thus are incentivized to support the USPS at all cost, so they do.
It's not the only interpretation of the modern USPS, but it's hard not to grumble about that one when using the incredibly poorly run locations that bless NYC. It's also hard to love the USPS when you consider that this interpretation results in thousands of tons of paper printed, moved, delivered, and then put directly in landfills every year for essentially no benefit.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/business/seeking-revenue-p...
I don't expect to use this service but, at times, it would be nice to see what mail is waiting for me to pick up. If I knew there wasn't anything important there, I might just skip going and save myself a trip.
Also, my next door neighbors are out-of-state travelling for about half of the year and I get their mail while they're gone. They let me know if they're expecting something important so that I can open it and tell them what it says or forward it to them or whatever while they're gone. With this service, they would know for sure when those items arrive.
I'm sure it could be trained to be highly accurate and let you whitelist as needed.
They just have to make sure to charge enough to still profit after accounting for lost junk mail revenue.
Once had a lady tell me she wanted to surprise her husband by paying the mortgage when i delivered a certified from her bank. (She drove her van to find me each day) when I gave her the cert AND the (usual) non-certified piece she said she was paying in 1/2 in each letter. I knew it was BS and the letter was "bad"
If my mailbox were a Gmail inbox it'd be 98% spam, 2% government. And yet, it's a Gmail inbox I can't close.
But I do agree, it would be a nice feature to have a "no junk mail" switch that could be turned on.
[1] I believe they do not charge a high enough price for the junk, but they do get paid to deliver it in any case.
USPS could do the same thing. $1-2 / month for mail delivery service?
1. Get a box (not too large - just small enough to fit thru the door of the post offices package box - or better, use one of the USPS free shipping boxes)
2. Collect the junk mail, and put it in the box, sans any identifying information (this is important!)
3. As you collect the junk mail, keep back one of the pre-paid envelopes sent with some junk mail.
4. When the box is full, tape it up, and tape or glue the pre-paid envelope to the front. Alternatively, put the address of the postmaster general on the front. Leave the return address blank!
5. Take it to a random post office, and mail it. Use the outside boxes, and make sure not to be caught on any cameras (you may need to do a bit of looking around first)
6. Repeat as needed, paying attention to the previous step and not using the same post office each time.
This is probably not completely legal - but if you do mail it to the postmaster general instead of using a pre-paid envelope, I think you can do so without needing to pay for a stamp or anything (can't recall).
It might be very satisfying to do it once or twice, though.
/ymmv, the above is for entertainment purposes only
[0]: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mai...
[1]: http://kdvr.com/2015/03/11/mysterious-spy-cameras-collecting...
So, of course they have images of all your mail.
Also, it's been known for some time that the federal government collects data on mail, like emails and phone calls. This article covers that, from 2013... https://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail... and it involves this program, which apparently exists for legitimate business purposes, but the data is also used for surveillance: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_Isolation_Control_and_T...
This product is likely a result of the data collected from the surveillance project, not the other way around.
If you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; otherwise please don't comment until you do.
And with my tinfoil hat on, I'm saying it's probably driven by requests from three-letter agencies. We already know they scan the covers not just for automated processing (which as you mention wouldn't require saving the image after the OCR is complete), but to also provide it to law enforcement.
If public pressure is forcing those agencies to be more forthright with what data they're collecting and storing, it conceivable for them to push that responsibility upstream. If the USPS is going to be imaging and storing everyone's mail, there's no need for other agencies to do so. They can just access it on the fly.
Arguably, the government would save money with this approach as well as I'm sure all three major agencies would want a full copy the data set.
Though I'm sure the primary purpose of scanning envelopes is, ya know, to see where they're going.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_cover 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_Isolation_Control_and_Tra...
For now sure but there's no reason this couldn't be a premium service down the road.
Heck, I'd pay for it if it allowed me to access it programmatically, process the cover images to filter junk mail, and have them (for an added fee / driven by API) shred them for me.
If anyone wants to try building it that idea out let me know. I'll beta test.