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Comment by browningstreet | Hacker News Reader

I get an email from the USPS every day with pictures of all the mail coming to my mailbox. It’s a service they offer for free.

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Informed delivery: https://www.usps.com/manage/informed-delivery.htm

My local hackerspace uses this service with some OCR to email members when they have mail waiting at the space.

I just did this and paired it with ChatGPT to send me a Discord message like "You received mail from Progressive."

Seems silly and lazy but it was a fun afternoon project

(boring aside: USPS seems to have bespoke anti-bot measures which uses WASM to sign requests, which means you have to use full browser automation to login. Of course, most people instead parse the daily emails they send you which is a totally reasonable approach as well.)

While a pain to automate on a server, Puppeteer/Playwright are both pretty straight forward to script against.

I had another one for a bit that would scan, open, and scan your mail also. Forward packages. Cheap and easy if you’re on the go.

https://www.postgrid.com/mail-scanning-service-companies/

Probably also sold to Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and others

Yep, came here to say this. I don't use it often, but it's pretty handy from time to time (e.g. checking to see if an important package requiring a signature is coming that day, so I can be home or arrange for someone else to be there).

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