Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail
the418.substack.com191 points by shayneo a day ago
191 points by shayneo a day ago
I live in a small town and I have my postmaster's personal cell phone number. She's very professional and attentive,. Based on our conversations, I don't believe USPS maintains the level of rigor for reliability that software engineers would expect (fire drills, KPIs for reliability, incident review, root cause analysis, etc).
We started having serious issues with valuable mail turning up missing. Car registration tabs, checks, statements , priceless letters . Informed delivery was inconsistent with physical delivery -- and the postmaster said that's expected. Some valuables were delivered to the wrong address and forwarded weeks later by conscientious neighbors.
What I came to discover is that USPS does not maintain quality controls , neither e2e or at the last line. The post office does not have any sort of log of delivery issues that I could tell. No real testing or auditing is being done (auditing, red-teaming, e2e testing). I doubt they could provide a quantitative measurement of reliability at any level of the system. If a zip code or subdivision had 5% mail go missing over a week, I doubt they would notice or have a protocol for resolving it.
The postmaster and staff did do their best to address the issue, with good customer care and attentiveness. But the issue was never resolved. I now send valuables via other vendors , and rely on USPS for junk mail.
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.
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.
I appreciate this story. Institutions are made of people , and their service is only as good as the culture. The most important factor is whether people actually care . Leadership can then guide them in the right direction.
Do they have the money to do that? Are the people in charge (through political appointment) incentivised to make the service better?
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.
Receiving mail correctly at the address on the label isn't a problem with the post office.
I have a version of this; I have the email {{popular-asian-surname}}@gmail.com and I've seen _everything_.
I've had many many bank statements from India.
I've had someone in California order a brand new BMW and got the details for collection.
I've had paypal invoices and statements (this is one funny because they refuse to action the delink).
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.
Now, I mark as junk and move on.
The best one I had was a dating site in Canada, I got it while sat next to me partner.
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.
I have the opposite of this. My primary email address is hello@firstnameMIlastname.com. But there's another guy who has the same name, and doesn't include his middle initial in his domain. It doesn't appear that uses hello@, so maybe he doesn't get my mail, but there have been many times where someone insists they've sent me something, only for me to find out they didn't include my middle initial and were sending stuff to him, despite the fact that I sent them my email correctly. Why didn't they just copy and paste?
I get a lot of random email for other people with the same first initial/last name as me. I had one specific person using my email for a lot of things.
I just canceled her membership in a bowling league, and when the league reached out to ask why, I told them I have no idea who <her name> is. I stopped getting email meant for her after that.
Ugh, I could've written this. I have my HN username at one of the old webmail providers. I log in there about once a year to keep the account live (because said provider re-issues unused accounts after a while). Each time, I see another person's info. My name isn't freakishly unusual, but neither is it John Smith.
I've used my personal experience in a design meeting where some newer PMs were IMO unreasonably sure that users wouldn't mistype their own email address. Oh, let me tell ya, they absolutely 100% do.
I have a similar thing, [firstname][number]@gmail.com and I get all sorts of crap. It's honestly mind-boggling how much.
It really makes you appreciate proper email address validation - all sorts of services let people sign up, don't validate and there's no good way to have your email address removed from their account...
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.
I was expecting this person to be you.
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 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.
What evidence do you have that this happened, aside from the fact that you're receiving mail intended for him and sent to that address?
Unless you have something much stronger than that, chances are the other guy actually has firstlast2@gmail.com (or whatever) and frequently forgets to add the number.
If this story is true, this would appear to be a simple vector for hijacking email intended for other gmail users. Hard to understate the severity if true.
Have you tested whether you can receive email directed to firstlast@gmail.com? Perhaps theirs is really firstlastt@gmail.com and all their contacts "correct" it.
This feels like a bug that he snuck through early or during a temporary window, before Google started defaulting to . as an ignored alias. Maybe not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Have you ever tried just logging in as firstlast@gmail.com? If it works, with the usual password you use for first.last@gmail.com, it makes me think he has firstlastt@gmail.com or something similar and people sending him emails input it wrong, which causes them to send it to you. Maybe he also inputs it wrong sometimes when he is signing up for stuff.
Do you have proof? Really, firstlast@gmail.com is your account, even if you use first.last to sign in. People simply give out email addresses that don’t belong to them. Plain and simple. 100%, this is just some person giving out firstlast@gmail.com as their email addresses because it sounds good to them.
I observed a similar issue and years ago a Googler reached out after I bitched about it on HN and looked into it.
They claimed that it was a typo and I believe them. Places don’t validate email and people make alot of typos.
Do you have any proof that that separate address exists, with its own account, mailbox and such, and it is not just someone putting your email in the email field?
I have the same problem. There are about 5-7 active idiots using “firstlast@gmail.com” and I get them all.
Suspect their real email is something like “firstlast10” or “firstlest” (minor spelling variant). Not sure if they deliberately misspell their email or are just stupid.
For a while really thought amount was compromised.
Slowly I realized they are just idiots and assholes. They don’t always pay bills, buy $100 T-shirts, own crappy vehicles, and seem to conduct business with people who don’t verify email either.
Even once got into an argument with an idiot persistently claiming he owned “firstlast.com” (as I replied to a thread using such from my email server. I’ve owned the domain for 20+ years). He was a certifiable idiot, also by trade…
I also get a lot of “mcafee subscription” PayPal scam mails. Also have seen a lot of spam real subscription accounts created using the same email but with wildly different names. Suspect it is fraudsters testing credit cards.
The sheer number of big name companies that don’t validate emails surprises me…
If they're giving their e-mail address to other people, it's possible that those other people are hearing "lest" and respelling it as "last". So it's not the person that shares a name with you that's stupid, but the people they deal with.
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.
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.
>email / gmail is not case sensitive Jsmith@gmail.com is the same as jsmith@gmail.com
gmail is not case sensitive. email systems are allowed to be case sensitive, most choose not to be. This used to be an issue to deal with when pre-internet legacy email addresses (like Lotus Notes corporate email, or Outlook/Exchange systems) were put onto the internet.
Email systems are allowed to be within their own domains. If an email is sent from Yahoo.com to Gmail.com, case is irrelevant.
So, assuming case matters is foolish.
> So, assuming case matters is foolish
Oh so much fun with my yearly quiz testing students about case-sensitivity! They're always wrong because thinks are so horribly broken.
It is absolutely foolish, assuming case _may_ not matter in the Internet. Case does not matter, true, except it does.
One of my favourite parts: URL paths are case-sensitive, except most servers do not care (because of a case-insensitive filesystem), and they're not always case-sensitive, e.g. for the mailto-scheme the path is case-insentive, because the path is actually an e-mail adress (which is itself case-insensitive).
Gmail also parses out periods in the address. j.smith@gmail.com will go to the same place as `jsmith@gmail.com`.
I have firstnamelastname@gmail.com and it surprises me how many other people have my same name. I get so much unintended mail, usually to firstname.lastname at gmail. I have found that in a lot of cases they have forgotten a middle initial. I usually let it go as spam unless it looks important like a credit card. What frustrates me is that these companies will not interface with me at all, sometimes not even leaving a note on the account.
I understand from the security side why they wont, but I wish there was something they could do. I could easily log in and change a password then cancel the account, but I figure there's probably some legal trouble if I did that.
I get credit card stuff and credit report stuff from bozos with similar nanes to me. I used to try to inform them, they won't let me. The worst are Experian, who won't let me interact with them at all, because I can't prove I'm the person or people who've been mistakenly using my email address.
You'd think that they would be willing to interact with someone sending emails from the same address they're spamming!
My stock reply to this used to be that you can send emails from anyone - who the email is sent from is not authenticated.
It's a little less true now with some of the newer protections, but only today I received a fairly subtle spam/scam supposedly from the main email address of a major retailer, so I think it's still sensible to never every trust the "From:" part of an email.
This is an useful to know for websites that incorrectly mark the address as invalid for a '.' in the local portion.
I briefly had {{firstname}}@gmail.com back when it was invite only. Man that was a mistake.
I still have firstname@gmail.com It died down after a while (as in after 20 years).
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.
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.
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.
Make a filter for emails that contain “ñ”
Haha. Do you have a similar character for Japanese? Some douche bag added my GitHub email address into some Japanese spam farm a few weeks ago. I am now flooded with Japanese spam. I don't read or speak a word of Japanese.
は or す would be my suggestions.
Wow, the first one 'は' seems really good. Out of 279 messages in my Spam folder, 216 messages matched that character, missing only 24 additional Japanese spam. (That means 240/279, or 86% of my spam is Japanese, god damn it).
The second one 'す' matched only 10 Japanese spam messages.
You could also try the particle for belonging の which is a bit like " 's " in English. Should appear in hiragana (as a standalone syllable) frequently since it is a particle much like the first one they suggested (ha for the theme of a sentence). The second one (su) tends to be at the end of maybe half the verbs, might be why it's less likely.
Another one which might match is Japanese punctuation, such as the comma 、 and the period 。
https://www.tofugu.com/japanese-grammar/particle-no-noun-mod...
Nice! The 'の' (237 matches) is even better than 'は' (216 matches). The 'の' matches every Japanese spam in my Spam folder.
I was not able to use comma 、 and the period 。 because I think FastMail disables searches on common punctuations, so those matched nothing.
(In case people are wondering, I sometimes scan through my Spam folder to check for false positives, i.e. things which were incorrectly marked as spam. It's difficult to do that when it is flooded with Japanese spam.)
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.
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.
I haven't gotten any that I know of for years, but when my school initially created email forwarding, it let you choose anything--so I just used my first name which is common but not that common. (To this day if I'm in a meeting with someone who shares it, we regularly get confused when someone else asks something that I have no idea about.) I got all sorts of board meeting minutes and other emails from people who assumed I was that first name early-on.
I'm in the same boat. I assume people do it because some website is demanding an email address and they don't want to give one, so they give the "default" one.
I have to admit, I do this. Sorry John Smith!
I always assumed that the "default" email addresses get flooded with spam nowadays. I can't imagine the email address lee@gmail.com or similar to be usable by now
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.
I was an early Gmail adopter and have a common ethnic first initial last name. People mess up their email all of the time and I get insane stuff.
One lady, a general manager of a factory, sent a zip file with her VPN client, a list of backup MFA codes and a list of SCADA and IT systems for a large factory.
A police detective sent a video from a paratransit bus that was in an accident. I got a bitcoin years ago. One dude had a hobby of test driving luxury cars from almost every dealer in the Washington DC region. I have a $50 gift card for an Australian electronics store.
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 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
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.
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 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 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 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 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.
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.
> 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
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.
I use Informed Delivery for my PO box since I don't get much mail there. The worst thing about it is that the USPS uses the system to announce when there are new episodes of Mailin’ It! - The Official USPS Podcast.
They send the daily digest saying "You have 1 mailpiece arriving soon." Instead of the usual picture of the 'mailpiece', it's an image illustrating the episode. There is no physical mail corresponding to this alert, it's electronic junk mail. Spam. Ugh. There is no opt out for these apart from canceling the service entirely.
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.
I posted this on the Substack, but
At one point, I entered the wrong address when I was forwarding my mail. As a result, I got my mail sent to a strangers PO Box. As a side effect, I then began to receive Informed Delivery for this stranger to this very day.
In addition, I once had the Post Office disable my address. It was like a 101B address and they didn’t consider it legitimate with the city. As a result, they were unable to forward mail when I left that house, and once again, and they were unable to disable the informed consent for this house.
As a result of this, I see every piece of mail that two separate strangers receive. I have gone to the post office a half dozen times in the last 5 years to try to disable this, and have repeatedly been told there is absolutely nothing that can be done.
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.
It depends on which organization they're in. Plenty of them think of their job as legal PR, finding the loosest precedent they can to justify the organizations actions as accepted and legal.
I've never understood why departments are reporting to themselves and not an independent inspector.
Granted, politicians and the people they appoint will do anything to justify their actions, even across organizations, but it might open the door for political opponents to call each other out, on their bad actions.
Practically speaking, the outsides of envelopes addressed to you are much more like unencrypted HTTP traffic were: Trivial for many people other than sender and receiver to become aware of, therefore it's advisable to not print interesting secrets on the outside of mail in the first place (and indeed, you can just address mail without any front-facing return address or any return address if you don't want a chance of that data leak through any means).
Probably half of people get their mail in an unlocked mailbox that anyone can casually open and peek at before you get home from work. And every postal worker can of course see the information as they handle the mail.
Not saying that's ideal, but just pointing out that this doesn't represent a tremendous loss of privacy.
On the other hand, opening mail not addressed to you is a very serious crime.
I wonder he he also receives that mail or was going to but someone caught it?
My post office for a good year was horrendous about delivering me my neighbor's mail. I felt like a Jr. Mail Carrier in training ;)
Last few years they've been SPOT on.
I tried informed delivery but honestly it's more of a hassle for me as my wife says "this should have arrived today" and of course it doesn't so she thinks it's stolen and ... it arrives 3 days later.
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.
USPS has a few times delivered items to our address which were intended for the recipient 1 block north with the same street number. It's how I've started to wonder if they might be Russian mafia all over there in their track suits.
For some reason, delivery drivers have huge problems finding my block of flats, and will often deliver stuff to the house with my flat number across the road, despite me putting in the delivery instructions that I live in the block of flats, not the house. I've occasionally had to go over and "steal" my own package back from outside their door and hope nobody calls the police on me
> 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 her defense, it used to mean that everywhere. That picture means that the mail was sorted and placed for the carrier to deliver.
The gotcha is that the staff shortfalls and prioritization of Amazon and parcels means your route based mail may not be serviced correctly.
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?
I've definitely gotten the sense that the flip side of that is happening - in many cases, items get marked as "shipped" when the label is printed, but often shippers don't hand the package off to the carrier until days later. I can't prove it but sometimes it very much feels like sellers, especially on platforms like etsy and ebay, make sure to print the label immediately and mark the item as shipped so they can claim fast shipping, but then are in no hurry whatsoever to actually get the package in transit. Maybe this is not nefarious and is just a side effect of the way the systems work together, but as a customer it's pretty annoying. For me it's less about how long it takes to get the item and more about feeling mislead on whether it is actually on its way or not.
That definitely happens, I don't think it's intentionally nefarious though.
They tend to package and label orders as they come in, that's the only thing you can do to be efficient -- you can't let them build up.
But then they only drop off (or get pickup) 2x/week, e.g. Tues and Fri. Which might be fine if that's what their shipping times indicate.
But then the buyer gets confused because they assume it was mailed immediately, which it wasn't. But there's no way for a seller to print shipping labels from eBay in advance without eBay marking it as "shipped".
It gets even more confusing because with bulk pickups or dropoffs, they often don't even get scanned when the carrier receives them. They won't show as actually in the carrier's hands until they reach the first major hub, which can easily be a day or even two later.
Delivery companies in Europe have an initial status of something like "notification of package received", which should be followed by "package received from sender".
I assume they do this to avoid complaints of slow delivery when the sender takes a whole to post the item.
>I've definitely gotten the sense that the flip side of that is happening - in many cases, items get marked as "shipped" when the label is printed, but often shippers don't hand the package off to the carrier until days later.
AIUI, Amazon's policy is that credit cards don't get charged until the order ships.
As such, some shadier folks will create the label long before the item is actually shipped. However, since the label has been created, the order is now marked as "shipped" and the credit card is charged even though nothing has been packed, let alone actually shipped.
That is an incentive for some shippers for sure, and it gets pushed down onto the (often overworked) delivery drivers. They have metrics on how many things they should deliver or attempt delivery each day and are sometimes judged harshly on those metrics.
I have multiple times seen an "Out for Delivery" package switch to "Delivered" or "Delivery Attempted" at 10pm, presumably when the driver ended their shift and didn't want to be penalized for the undelivered packages. They usually showed up the following day.
> I have multiple times seen an "Out for Delivery" package switch to "Delivered" or "Delivery Attempted" at 10pm
Exactly this, it's infuriating.
And you can usually tell because a) it's marked as delivered at a time rounded to a perfect hour, like 2:00 pm or 9:00 pm (not 8:34 pm), and b) there's no delivery photo, when there always is otherwise.
But yeah, it's the driver not being able to make all deliveries (probably not their fault), but needing to fake the metrics. Usually they drop it off the next day or two days later, but other times it just gets lost, and it's harder to get a refund from the seller because it says delivered. So e.g. eBay will side with the seller in a dispute.
> like Amazon reporting something is delivered the day before it actually shows up
I feel like this one happens because the driver needs to meet quota today, so they scan the package delivered today, then when they are in the area tomorrow they actually deliver the package.
Unfortunately, this makes "delivered today" not a reliable indicator of "I actually received the package today".
Also, lots of emails. For some deliveries I get an email from the carrier, the company I bought the thing through, and someone who handles the actual thing on the other side of the retailer. App notifications. Like guies I get it ...
Amusingly, for some obscure software, I write those emails ;)
> 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.
No, these scans happen in sorting facilities in automated machinery far before delivery. A human still delivers the mail.
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.
I suspect the same. Over the years I've gotten waves of bad and good and honestly the bad just seemed like someone not paying attention to how much of the pile they grabbed ;)
If I got a bad delivery I got a lot of other people's mail, like someone not paying attention and just grabbing multiple addresses at once and tossing them in my mailbox.
I've noticed this too.
That said, it's not really terribly unusual to actually just receive someone else's mail. I've gotten mail that was meant to go to my neighbors a number of times. So I reckon that an issue like this probably isn't a big deal in the long run; if it was that big of a concern, then actually accidentally delivering to the slightly-wrong-address would be worse.
I have an even better version. I rent a small PO box and I keep getting the condo management company's mail meant for the next PO box over. Interestingly enough while informed delivery worked in the pilot program, they kicked it out when it was launched because my box is commercial. So I don't know when mail is inbound and just have to check when I think there's something.
I sometimes only check the box once a month, and it's not uncommon it's full of bill pay checks for people's rent lol.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
Where this gets interesting is that very often you can see through the envelope slightly.
It's similar to if you hold a flashlight to the back of an envelope and can then see 'through' it to read the paper inside.
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
Yeah I believe so. Going through some of my old informed delivery emails I see a few with the crosshatch privacy pattern which seems to work reasonably well. I wonder if manipulating the image in some way (brightness, etc) may reduce that effect.
I also have a number of mailings from my bank that include things like account balances & numbers, with no privacy pattern. So it seems hit or miss.
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.
Just like USPS should not send you images of other peoples mail, a lot of mail isn't in the type of envelope they should be. I'm looking at multiple bank statements where I can read balances.
Another vector is the plastic window many envelopes have to show the addressee printed on the paper inside. I have another healthcare related letter I can read through that.
This happens to me almost daily. I get photos of mail sent to the couple I bought my house from 4.5 years ago. Their mail never actually arrives in my mailbox, but it's still quite a privacy breech for the former owners (who were clearly operating a business out of their home, in violation of the HOA rules (not that I care an iota)).
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).
Every time this happened to me, it was due to incorrect interpretation of the number portion of my street address. Usually confusing 0 and 8.
For example, my address is 150 Main Street and it would send me photos of mail addressed to 158 Main Street.
Is the incorrectly shared mail piece addressed to someone with a quite similar address, or potentially someone who previously lived there?
Just having thought once in a while about how complicated addresses are, I can only imagine all the things that can go wrong. (both for the post office, and for example, credit cards/banks that have to use addresses in validation of purchases, etc)
Imagine an apartment building with many units. Think of how people differently specify on the address lines which unit they live in? What if they leave off their unit #? What about apartments that are numbered "345 1/2 Second Street"?
What about a new person with the same last name that appears at an address? What do you do about that? Is an address that differs by a very subtle letter a different household? E.g. "345b Second Street"? Should you ship a package there or approve a credit card, or is that likely to be an attempt to fraudulently divert mail to someone else who is nonexistent?
I'm sure it's endlessly complicated, and I have no idea. But I know it will be complicated.
In industry parlance this is called piggybacking when two items are scanned/processed at the same time, leading to inconsistencies.
Every now and then I return-to-sender something that looks important to my address's previous resident and sharpie out the barcode along the bottom. If you don't do this your RTS items will come back to you regardless of what you stamp it with. Even still I receive an informed delivery photo of it.
My belief is that the informed delivery system is using optical recognition while the sorters are using the barcodes.
USPS is awful from a privacy perspective. USPS will email photos of your incoming mail to anyone who files a change-of-address form with your address as the new address. They don't require any sort of confirmation.
I know this because after I moved out of a place and started traveling for a while, I set up forwarding to my parents' address, and after clicking the "informed delivery" checkbox I immediately started getting photos of all my parents' mail.
I've had my wife's distant aunt's mail delivered to an old apartment of mine that an old roommate told me about. My wife never lived at that apartment and that aunt never visited or even knew my address.
The USPS sometimes does some really strange things. The address was for the aunt's house but forwarded to my old apartment.
I get this semi-frequently too; but, the biggest problems for me w/this system are:
1. I get the pictures DAYS before the actual mail (weekends ignored). Why?!
2. I sometimes don't get pictures of the mail at all, particularly mail that's not bulk mail--it's from individual to individual.
I could give a flying fuck that I'm going to be getting 5 advertisements in a few days. I want to know when I'm getting ACTUAL mail and this system doesn't seem to capture that effectively.
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.
Indeed, there are regional sorting centers that then send to the local post offices to go to the carriers. Although what I find odd is that for residential delivery, I always get the mail the same day, only at my P.O. Box does the mail sometimes come 1–3 days later.
If you look at the email, the promise isn’t “coming today” but “coming soon”.
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.
I get this all the time, I assume because I live in an apartment an they're previous residents. The interesting thing is they don't actually get delivered, so it's being caught somewhere in the system.
That said I do also get misdelivered mail, which I don't get Informed Delivery for. I've gotten tax documents, jury summons, settlement checks, you name it. People really need to file a change of address.
USPS usually sends me emails that reference a package, that the web dashboard doesn't display. or has packages stuck in their system from a thursday several months ago.
This happened to me before and I reported it through their website and they actually fixed it for me at least, I guess the problem still exists though.
USPS started sending me pictures of the place where I used to live 5 years ago all the sudden, they are not addressed to me and there is no way I can stop these mails (I could block them on gmail but that will affect my own digest).
You have it easy! Occasionally USPS delivers me other people's mail!
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.
Assuming your country follows the path of Denmark (I think the western country with the least post per person) the situation will resolve itself: you'll stop getting letters for anything.
I receive about 6 letters a year, though the average was 33 per person last year.
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.
About once a month for me. I assume some of my mail ends up with other people as well.
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 no big deal. From the photograph in the blog, it's clearly a problem with the mail handling machine. No big whoop.
As a reminder, there is no legal expectation of privacy for the outside of your mail. Envelopes are no different than post cards. Anyone can legally read them.
Years ago, I'd signed up for the Informed Delivery service, which is where these images originate.
When I moved, I forgot to cancel the service and so received pictures of the next person's mail. It was simple to cancel.
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.
> these scanners can actually peer into the envelopes due to I guess the bright light used by the scanners
You write that as if it's accidental.
> 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.
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.
Did you not put in a change of address request? They automatically unenroll you from informed delivery.
You shouldn't put in a change of address; USPS sells those addresses as a revenue source. Just manually change your address with each service.
There are plenty of other sources selling my address anyway. Having mail forwarded is a good way for me to know which ones I need to update.
In my experience, they're also not particularly reliable either.
After filing a change of address form, I got quite a bit of mail still going to the old address. The forwarded mail, if it arrived at all, was significantly delayed.
It also costs money after a period of time, then expires.
It's possible that their eLOT, delivery point code, or some other auxiliary USPS metadata is messed up for themselves or their neighbor.
I live in nyc and routinely receive other people's mail. I can only imagine the postal worker is dyslexic and not qualified for the job. It makes me wonder how much of my own mail is misdelivered.
Occasionally USPS sends me other people's mail
More than Occasionally
This happens to me sometimes. I bought a house and occasionally get pictures of the previous owners mail. I assume it's because these scans take place before the new address forwarding because I don't receive their mail.
I recently started getting notifications and pictures of mail from a place I moved out of in 2013. I think I must have had informed delivery set up for that address back then and the new resident signed up and now I'm getting notifications again?
The first time I noticed this was after I had renewed my passport. I got a notification saying that I was expecting a package in Tacoma. I was so confused, thinking maybe someone has stolen my CC number. The ln I remembered my passport should be on the way. I freaked out, contacted my ex and asked her to go back there and talk to the current resident to see if they had my passport. Then I got another notification, logged into the USPS website, and saw that I had notifications for this guy's mail at my old house.
90% of my snail mail is junk - so it really does not matter.
I often also actually get other people's mail. Not every day, not even every month, but a couple times a year.
I don't consider this a vulnerability, per se. This is the the usual level of uncertainty when dealing with physical objects.
The government does a ton of genuinely bad privacy violations. Leaking pictures of the outside of an envelope is not one of them.
Please stop getting people riled up about fake problems. You are pissing in the pool.
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What's the point of a service that emails you pictures of your snail mail? You'll know about it anyway when it's delivered, and unlike a parcel, no action is required to receive it. Not snark, I'm legitimately asking - I'm probably missing something.
I legitimately can't remember the last time I received actual mail in my mailbox. Everything goes to e-boks.dk.
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 started using it once I moved into an apartment complex where the mailboxes are not between the entrance and my apartment. If I know I have mail coming that is actually important I reroute to get the mail, which would be annoying to do every day.
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.
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.