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Comment by jasonthorsness | Hacker News Reader

Wow TIL about the USPS Informed Delivery service that sends pictures of your mail for free. Apparently OP might occasionally see my mail but who cares, this is great https://www.usps.com/manage/informed-delivery.htm

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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.

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.

It was free to sign up, but...

> Note that some pieces of mail trigger ads from third party companies.

of course they do (although the mail itself is like 95% ads anyway with junk mail so I guess I won't really complain)

The ones that amuse me the most are the ads for—informed delivery.

This service is extremely valuable to me. I monitor my elderly mother's mail (she lives on her own, but several hours away), checking for anything important as well as obvious junk. Then, when I talk to her on the phone, we go through her mail together and I know how the conversation should go.

> 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.

I don’t think that’s accurate. They already had the scanning/imaging pipeline for routing and sorting. It wasn’t until later that they realized it’d be a good service to email the images to the recipients every morning – hence, Informed Delivery. It’s like a side-project that grew into a bonafide feature.

No. It goes back to the 1990s when we used Data Entry Operators to key mail details that could not be read by OCR. This is all so the mail goes into the truck sorted. That is the most important part of the mail delivery operation.

The fact that you can get pictures from this system is the innovation but imaging has existed for much longer than this product.

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