Re: OT: USPS "informed delivery"

I'm surprised that they don't offer it already. Typically used for serving legal documents or ship smaller valuable items in the UK. It is marginally cheaper than most proper couriers.

Most normal UK stamps now have unique potentially traceable QR style codes on them. The forged ones do too (it was supposed to prevent that).

They charge a premium price for signed for and tracked postal services. It is about the only thing they make money on now. You can see where the your parcel is sat rotting away due to their incompetence.

UK PO have priced themselves out of the market for letter post with most people and businesses using email instead. Virtual eCards at Xmas.

The only reason I have surface mail delivered is for utility bills and council tax to be able to prove who I am at banks (trivial to forge). UK doesn't have any coherent proof of ID system - it is a monumental joke.

You mean you want the Post Office to open your mail and read it? That's quite likely never going to happen. (And frankly, I'd rather it stay that way)

The informed mail sure comes in hand to a friend of mine. Almost every week he has to chase down his mail. There are some similar road names in the county . About once a month my dad got some mail delivered to him that should go aout 10 miles away. He lived on White Farm road and the other was just White road.

Similar to the tracking of packages. I did order one time about $ 100 worth of food from Walmart and it never got delivered to me. I like the way some package services take a picture of where they left the package. I thought they had left one at the wrong place form the picture but it was taken sideways.

The extra cost of ... what, exactly? A database row to send an email containing pictures that their automated processing system is already taking every day?

No. The process server has to identify the recipient and then hand them the subpoena or whatever.

No. It's about 1.5 miles away from my house. (1 mile by winding mountain road and 0.5 miles on state Hwy 9. Besides being close, the advantage for me is that the PO Box is fairly secure.

I don't know what the USPS expects from the service. I want it because it was the only way I could receive a warning that a potentially important document has arrived in my rural mailbox. If it is stolen after delivery, I have proof that something was delivered.

Note that Informed Delivery is described as:

The nearest such mailbox service is 6.9 miles away in Scotts Valley. The next nearest is about 10 miles away in Santa Cruz (city).

I appreciate you taking the time to pass judgment on my business practices. However, I was under the impression that you asked the question related to your business activities, not mine. What I provided is an example of what you might do with the service. You didn't ask about other options, so I didn't provide any.

The USPS does not open a letter or package and photograph the contents. The photo I receive from Informed Delivery is just the package shipping label or the front of the envelope. Most of the photos are B&W while magazines are in color.

Note that Informed Delivery is also available for businesses:

I found this document that describes how Informed Delivery might be beneficial to both the sender and recipient for an "interactive mail campaign".

Please re-read what I wrote: "The USPS does *NOT* open a letter or package and photograph the contents".

Yes. It's the tracking number that the USPS stamps on every 1st class mail and package. I'm not sure but I don't think they offer tracking services to bulk mail users. The codes and labels have changed over the years: "USPS eliminating legacy codes, revising forms"

Note that the intelligent mail barcode does not include the destination address, which is on a different label.

The automatic mail sorters can read (using OCR) an amazing variety of scribbled and illegible addresses. For the few addresses that can't be read, a photo of the illegible address on the letter or package is sent to a remote encoding center, where real live humans perform the functions of the reading the address and printing a readable bar code on the package. I'm not sure what happens if an address can't be found. I suspect there may be some special handling involved that doesn't involved opening the package or photographing all 6 sides of the box.

According to: