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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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

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.

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.

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)).

You have it easy! Occasionally USPS delivers me other people's mail!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

> 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"

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?

> 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.