Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail

I had someone send me their entire credit report. Luckily I am not a scammer and I deleted it for them. They sent me an Amazon gift card to thank me for not stealing their PII.

I get DoorDash order notifications, Uber notifications, etc

I am not sure how they signed up with my email as I never got a sign up notification

Part of this also is because email / gmail is not case sensitive Jsmith@gmail.com is the same as jsmith@gmail.com. I see a lot of Jsmith vs jsmith (like how I actually use my email).

Nothing is getting stolen from me but not sure how this is actually working for people.

Same for me... I have a relatively obscure last name, but that's my Gmail address. I receive numerous random emails intended for other individuals with a similar name.

> The best one I had was a dating site in Canada, I got it while sat next to me partner.

The plausible deniability this email address gives you is remarkable

Everyone I know that made an email on the major free providers using just a common surname (and maybe initial) in some language are getting other people's communications.

It's like regular people don't use email unless forced to and forget what it is when giving it out...

Yep, same here. I've closed accounts folks opened with my email address, sent replies to humans confused why I haven't shown up to an appointment, etc. I just can't stop the flow of emails from these folks using my email address for seemingly legitimate business.

Google doesn't offer anything in the way of migration or consolidation of various email-linked data (e.g., store purchases) so I just let mail accumulate and delete everything manually once every few months.

This happens to me too - mostly from people in South America: i get their phone bills, receipts, etc... And now the knock on effect of spam is crushing my inbox. I know its spam related to these emails because its all in Spanish. I am thinking of abandoning my gmail to something new.

This is me. I was one of first batches of gmail users when it went public. I have a common name. It’s wild that people will just use my email because they forget their own email address.

My email address is my full name. It’s not a common one, there are four of us that I can discover online.

My Floridian namesake has a troubled existence - I get emails from debt collectors, the police, court summons, and his employer, an HVAC company.

He also likes Dolly Parton and crystal meth, and goes to rennaisance fayres.

My namesake from BC likes to go to nightclubs and Costco, and is very busy on the gay dating scheme.

I find it sweet they like to keep me in the loop.

I recently logged into one of my email addresses that I hadn't used in years and discovered quite a few people had used it as their address for multiple things (of course they didn't have access to it so everything was unread). Lots of services do not really bother to validate the email address (there were e.g. Facebook, Instagram & TikTok emails).

One bigger item was that people were sending details regarding an estate & inheritance. This included an attorney office in Finland (to be clear, I'm also originally from Finland). After finding out I sent email to their DPO as this likely qualifies as GDPR security incident as the emails contained things like names, SSNs, addresses & of course details regarding how inheritance was split. I never got an answer so I reported it to Finnish DPA. I got reply from them pretty quickly that they contacted the DPO and that DPO will be in contact with me soon & the case is closed from DPA side. This was 4 months ago, I'm yet to be contacted by them.

I briefly had {{firstname}}@gmail.com back when it was invite only. Man that was a mistake.

In principle you could just send them a fake Mailer-Daemon error 550 User Mismatch message. ;)

I have first initial last name @gmail.com and it is a VERY common English language last name. This phenomenon got so bad I just abandoned that address and account. At some point you can't keep up with it, and marking legit email as spam has consequences of now MY email is getting marked as spam

I once got an email about the funeral arrangements for somebody's mother. I know this person very well, because he uses my email address for everything. I know what internet subscription he has. I know where he bought his e-bike. Where he goes on holiday. Etc.

And he's actually not the only person doing this! As far as I can tell, the only unusual thing about my Gmail is that it's relatively short and has no numbers. I suspect people just forget to add the digits at the end of their own address.

The problem is if you are also a user of these services you can't mark as junk because you'll stop geting paypal, bank, airline, car rental emails, etc.

I have the same issue. My gmail is {{my last name}}@gmail.com Just my last name. It's not that common, but there are about 500 people with it according to US Census data.

My HN username is also my gmail. I've got most of the stuff you mentioned, including unencrypted copies of US tax returns (with SSN) and house buying paperwork.

> I used to reach out and tell them I didn't sign up for their service. But honestly, after doing it for a few years I gave up.

Same here. It's surprising that most of the services don't use double-opt in before sending emails.

Some day, I want to use an LLM to identify those emails and label them.

I have an extremely common first and last name and my email address is first.last@gmail.

I get my fair share of misaddressed mail but it doesn’t help that I share the same name as the CEO of a major hotel chain’s timeshare business so I’ve getting tons of complaints about that :/

I've owned the domain name richardson.co.nz for some 25 years now and since then someone started a Richardson's realestate and registered richardsons.co.nz (note the additional "s").

I left the catch-all on my domains email going for a year or two before I had to disable it. The sheer amount of house blueprints, sensitive information about transfers etc was overwhelming.

I have one like that. I have the email first.last@gmail.com, and I have a very uncommon last name. Lo and behold, Google let some dude in Australia who happens to share my name sign up with firstlast@gmail.com. According to the docs the two should be equivalent, so they shouldn't have let him sign up, but they did... and now I get his email all the time. I have gotten job offers, bills from medical offices, even one follow up email from his therapist. And lots and lots of ads, of course. I have tried to let people know (when it's a real person contacting me) to let this guy know about the email situation, but either they don't reach out to him or he doesn't care. At this point I just delete all the emails meant for him without reading them, and figure if he misses out on a job offer or something... I tried my best.

Still, bizarre that the situation was allowed to occur in the first place by Google. Clearly they need to beef up their account creation checks a bit.

I get quite a few misaddressed e-mails to my gmail address as well. Everything from residential solar install invoices through a facebook account that someone continues to try to recover every couple months for years now I cannot delink (and thus cannot sign up for a Facebook account if I even wanted to with my primary e-mail address short of taking over that existing account in the wrong full name).

The best one so far is I've been on a group e-mail chain from some folks in France (I'm in the US) who organize a skiing trip each year to the Alps. I initially sent a couple "I am not the Phil you are looking for!" e-mails, but they continue to re-add me. I have thought about one day just showing up since I've been "invited" and have all the details for booking and just seeing what hilarity ensues.

My first name is "Save" in Spanish and Portuguese, and apparently people think they are saving documents when they send them to that gmail address. I have received medical records, employment documents, so many photos, insurance information, you name it.

I have a reasonably common name. I am in Bay Area, and have received mail meant for people in Fresno or Bakersfield, someone in Toronto, someone in Australia, and I think someone in a London suburb. There are drug test results, online orders, legal discussions, store receipts and hotel bookings. I even connected with 2-3 folks with my name - don't recall how I figured their other email. It was quite common for a while, but then I haven't seen anything like this for 2-3 years. When I say common, I mean once every 6-8 months and I guess I have had that email for 15 years or so. Maybe my universe of overlap was finite and all those people have figured out how to type their email now :)

That email is my first name dot last name but at one point I had been able to secure both first name at email provider dot come and last name at email provider dot com which somehow I abandoned. I wonder what level of erroneous emails I would have received at them.

Mine is {{random-initial}}{{random-initial}}{{uncommon-French-Canadian-surname}}@gmail.com, and I still get lots of wrong peoples' email messages. I've emailed more than one company to let them know they just violated HIPAA, and that they should really send a verification email first.

Also, when Venmo was new, and they were playing extra fast and loose, they set me up with someone else's bank account, so I just closed the Venmo account and used PayPal instead, which was a different company at the time.

I have {{popular job title in tech}}@gmail.com , and let me tell you.... yikes. Actually it's not that bad, I just tweak my enormous blacklist keyword filter once a month or so. For some reason, 99% of the junk is from India, which makes filtering easier. But brother you should see my "misdelivered crap" folder.

I share a name with a retired professional sportsperson. Alas for them, I hold the naturally occurring gmail account, having registered it two decades ago. Whilst they were active this account received regular sponsorship offers from unsuspecting apparel manufacturers, equipment makers etc etc, and it was always my pleasure to string these along as long as possible until someone twigged

This seems incredibly rampant on gmail. On the one hand I signed up early enough to have <common non-english surname><first initial>@gmail.com

Unfortunately people in countries of my parents native language seem to think my email address is theirs, and I get EVERYTHING. Vacation photos, medical records, car service reminders, the whole lot.

What's interesting is that none of the spam filters seem to have a "I'm a dumb American, I cannot read this language, therefore anything in this language should be spam" rule.

Physical junk mail is the USPS' bread and butter, so it's not surprising that they have no qualms about sending email spam either.

That would be an instant service cancellation for me.

Yep. Informed Delivery is mostly spam. (They recently added a note, something "no physical mail with this notice" - I guess others than me had started flagging them as lost.)

Informed Delivery also highlights mail lost in (some part) of the delivery process. Such as delivered to the wrong PO Box or the wrong address, or who knows what other creative methods they might think of. Then there is a process to point that out and "trigger a search"... and get only automated "Eh, what are you gonna do" kinds of answers.

Can't wait for being able to stop receiving paper entirely. Which will be a while because the other guys (the online guys) also love to build broken systems.

USPS risks becoming irrelevant if they don't actually start to care.

In South Africa we have the South African Post Office which has consistently and increasingly been made redundant/irrelevant by the actions of one particular organization far more so than any other: The South African Post Office

One of their biggest self-inflicted loss of relevance was due to a large strike by their workers in the early 2010's. Because of the prolonged strike people were not receiving their statements in a timely manner. At the time the law required that financial institutions send statements by post, due to this incident the government allowed the law to be changed and they were now allowed to send them by email instead.

For decades now the Post Office has had a reputation of stealing from mail. When my grandmother was still alive she used to always send a birthday card with a cheque by post to all her grandchildren for their birthdays, for around the last 10 years she was still alive the envelope I received had always been slit open and clearly "inspected", fortunately it seems they didn't feel these low value cheques were worth the effort.

Something else which used to keep the Post Office slightly relevant is that it was about the only place you could go to get your annual car license renewed. Every time you'd go there would be a huge queue waiting for the single teller who could process these while there were like 4 other tellers sitting at the other counters doing nothing. A few years back the organization which manages the licenses (not the post office) made a very surprisingly completely painless online system where you could pay by credit card and have it arrive at your door within a couple of days by courier.

In 2013 when I moved into a new house, I went to the local post office to arrange a P.O. box. To which they said "Sorry, we have none available, we can put you onto a waiting list for if one becomes available", it seems it never occurred to that branch's post master to perhaps look into making additional P.O. boxes available.

I have other stories of their general incompetence, but you get the idea. They've only been able to get away with it due to it being a government owned organization with seemingly zero effort by the government to hold management accountable for the grossly poor management, something that's pretty much the norm with most of our government and government run organizations.

Same experience here.

Informed delivery showed me a picture of the envelope containing my child's social security card, along with 2 other mail pieces for the day.

You can guess which one somehow didn't reach the mailbox. It's been months trying to get a replacement and now at under a year old my son already has to worry about identity theft his whole life.

Across two apartments in the last 5 years, I've received mail for no less than 5 different previous residents. Every week I'd end up with someone else's medical bills, bank statements, debt collection, the list goes on. I've zero faith at this point.

Do they have the money to do that? Are the people in charge (through political appointment) incentivised to make the service better?

You can solve this.

Contact your federal senators and/or federal house reps, and tell them that USPS is sending pictures of other peoples' mail.

Or if you dont want to do that, then contact USPS Office of Inspector General. uspsoig.gov/

The IG's are absolutely terrifying if you're on the wrong side. And you're 100% in the right, and they're in the wrong.

Exactly: Readable to anyone (that can insert themselves into) the delivery path – which is only very few people.

Just because there's other privacy issues with physical mail doesn't mean there ought to be even more when it comes to digital mail notifications.

On the other hand, opening mail not addressed to you is a very serious crime.

I get that with normal tracking lately too, like Amazon reporting something is delivered the day before it actually shows up. Have we misaligned some metric where now shippers want to announce stuff early so they can claim speed?

No, these scans happen in sorting facilities in automated machinery far before delivery. A human still delivers the mail.

> My post office for a good year was horrendous about delivering me my neighbor's mail.

Mine still is. Misdelivered mail has done more to help me get to know my neighbors than anything else. It's pretty community-building.

> it's more of a hassle for me as my wife says "this should have arrived today"

Same here (minus the "stolen" part). Wife overlooks the disclaimer on the page saying "delivery soon" and assumes that today's photos should be of today's deliveries. Continually pointing that fact out has not (yet) dissuaded her from this belief of "today's photos equal today's deliveries"

In my anecdotal experience, changes in how much of your neighbor's mail you get often ends up being due to a change to which individual carrier is delivering to your address. For over a decade growing up, we got our mail delivered by an exceptionally chill guy named Bill. As kids we'd get excited and run up when we saw him because he'd chat and joke with us, and he knew my parents by name and would chat with them often as well. We never got anyone else's mail from him, and no one ever got ours. Eventually, Bill got transferred to a different route, and the new person who delivered on our street would inexplicably stuff as many letters as he could into the insides of magazines going to a given address, and there was a high rate of getting our neighbors' mail inside of our magazines. When this first happened, my mother tried bring this up with him nicely, but nothing ended up changing. I can't remember how receptive he was to the feedback, but my mother didn't try to bring it up with him more than maybe once after that because she could tell it was a lost cause, and whenever it happened she'd roll her eyes and say that Bill would never make a mistake like that.

After college, I lived in an apartment for over four years where apparently the woman who had previously been in it switched to a different apartment in the same building (which was quite large, so I don't think I ever met her). In the first couple of weeks, we for a couple pieces of mail of hers that we'd leave with the doorman, and he'd give it to her (or maybe have it put in her mailbox instead), and this stopped happening after that for a while. A few years later, we started getting some mail for her again out of nowhere, and the first time I brought it down to the doorman, he mentioned that the person delivering mail to our building had switched recently. I have no clue why someone who hadn't delivered to the building before would be inconsistently delivering mail to her old address, but it basically never stopped happening during my remaining time there.

Hand-delivering mail intended for my neighbors, that was mistakenly placed in my mailbox, is how I met most of my neighbors. The sloppy USPS is an important part of my social life.

Did you not put in a change of address request? They automatically unenroll you from informed delivery.

Same thing happened to me except I wasn't able to stop it. I still receive pictures of mail going to an old PO Box I had.

I was going to write the same thing. Only thing I will add that these scanners can actually peer into the envelopes due to I guess the bright light used by the scanners. I can sometimes read letters before I actually physically receive them.

Therefore, the thicker the better and use privacy envelopes if you are really concerned.

> Envelopes are no different than post cards. Anyone can legally read them.

Anyone with access to them. You can absolutely not read my postcards, for example, because you don't have a key for my mailbox.

> As a reminder, there is no legal expectation of privacy for the outside of your mail.

Just because it's legal doesn't make it a great thing to happen.

I use this service. It's not that useful but sometimes it's good to see when an expected piece of mail is (roughly) going to arrive.

From what I can tell this was a capability the USPS has had for a while, probably going back to the days of anthrax spores being sent to politicians. The USPS was probably directed to track where every piece of mail came from and image the outside of it.

Informed Delivery was just a monetization of that system. Note that some pieces of mail trigger ads from third party companies.

This system interacts poorly with the USPS Change-of-Address system. Whenever I move, I either get no emails about my mail or I get two emails per day with the same images. When I get no more emails, sometimes they will mail me a letter with a validation code to continue getting emails, but my experience is that I need to enter the same validation code multiple times to get access restored.

This is why some envelopes have a pattern on the inside for privacy, right? I thought that was standardized a while ago for anything official and important. Smaller card sized envelopes maybe not though

Not really. It's good for snagging coupon codes, but not much else. Anything important will (should) be inside an envelope that is thick enough to block this trick.

What I’ve observed from six years of informed delivery is that the sorting step that generates the images for informed delivery happens before the step that handles forwarding and return to sender.

I’m not sure that any of the cases are that big of a privacy breach: It’s more inline with either getting the neighbor’s mail in your mailbox (which in my experience happens at about the same rate) or getting previous residents‘ mail in your mailbox (although my current carrier, after checking with me, intercepts most of these on her own initiative so I don‘t have to deal with them).

Not just a USPS problem. Fedex dropped a package off at my neighbor's house the other day. Luckily I have good neighbors, so he brought it right over.

Hah yes came here to say this, I often get a neighbors mail in my mailbox... so the scanning issue seems relatively minor.

This is an epidemic in my community. At least twice a month I walk over to my neighbors and deliver their mail left in my mailbox. They do the same to me. We’ve complained to the local post office, but they’re dealing with staffing issues and can’t guarantee anything.

I feel it’s a major invasion of privacy. I don’t want to know stuff about my neighbors like who they bank with, have student loans with or which doctors they go to. They also find out those things about me. But not much we can do about it.

I do not expect any service to be 100% accurate.

About once a month for me. I assume some of my mail ends up with other people as well.

Same. I also dont get mail for days then suddenly my box is stuffed.

USPS, FedEx, UPS, and Amazon all do this, but USPS is by far the worst here.

There's a new (well, it was several years ago) townhome in the town to the west that has exactly the same street address as mine, just a different city and ZIP code (just one digit different). We got their mail, packages, etc. a LOT for years. The best was when we got home and FedEx had dropped of a set of 4 overnighted tires on our porch.

The townhome is a rental, and sometimes, even when Amazon sends me a photo of their front porch, the townhome tenants claim they didn't get anything of ours. Either they're theives or they have a lot of porch pirates.

Same here, and Informed Delivery is actually a great feature for that (i.e. tracking whether one of my letters probably went to somebody else's mailbox again and whether it's worth asking the neighbors or looking on top of their mailboxes).

In industry parlance this is called piggybacking when two items are scanned/processed at the same time, leading to inconsistencies.

Is your parents address your credit card billing address?

So the way that this works has nothing to do with user experience. A long while ago, USPS automated the mail sorting at their distribution centers by taking photos of the mail. Anything that could be sorted automatically was, anything that fails falls back to humans to sort.

Someone over at USPS had the brilliant idea to save the photos they were taking to sort the mail anyway and email it to people at the addresses that the mail was being sorted to, and to do it for free.

It's basically repurposing a critical piece of infrastructure to give you a little QoL bonus with your mail, and we should be really thankful anyone thought to do it instead of complaining about what's lacking. Especially when policymakers use every attempt to defund it so they can get their ultimate goal of privatizing mail and package delivery.

> 1. I get the pictures DAYS before the actual mail (weekends ignored). Why?!

I'd bet it's because the envelopes are photographed in some central location, the photos get sent at the speed of light but the physical envelopes only start getting to the last mile physical delivery people after.

I think this is something that sucks about your particular sorting facility or you're just very unlucky. I've been using Informed Delivery since it launched, in two different states, and while it's not perfect, I find it pretty accurate, especially for normal mail (envelopes, postcards, and so forth). I'd guesstimate that it misses a real non-junk mail item less than 1% of the time, and it misstates when something will be delivered 5% of the time or less. Certainly not enough to offset the value of the service.

Genuinely curious -- was your comment directed towards the post author?

If you only rarely get mail in your box, you don't neee to check it regularly, unless something is coming.

Alternately, if you're away and something important is arriving, you can ask someone to check in on it for you. Maybe they would normally just stack it all up, but this one is interesting enough from the envelope that you'd like them to take a look inside.

It's mostly only mildly useful for me. But I recently had a bank send me a new debit card as mine was about to expire, and the card never arrived. The bank was under the impression it was delivered a certain day, and I was able to tell them that I have Informed Delivery and as far as I could tell, the USPS never even attempted to deliver the card (or, as it happened, anything else that particular day).

If you are waiting on a particular piece of mail it sometimes can be handy to know it'll be in your box soon instead of repeatedly checking the tracking or double-checking with the sender. If you don't receive mail every day, and your mailbox is at all exposed to the elements, it can remind you to check the box that day.

And if your mail is delivered where other people have access to it—a spouse, kids, roommates, etc.—it can let you know to check in with them if you don't see something that they may have put in an unusual place.

I find it super helpful! I get the emails for both my personal mail box on my street (nice to know if I should check it today or if it’s just junk and I can check it tomorrow or the next day) and for a PO Box.

I am the treasurer for an organization related to my job. We don’t usually get mail and the PO Box is located a few towns over. I rely on the emails to know when I need to visit the PO Box. It saves me gas and time, so I love it. Even if the PO Box was nearby, the emails would still save me time and hassle.