Unusually Well Informed Delivery

The U.S. Postal Service scans the outside address-side of all your mail. Obviously. They have to have automated mechanisms that sort the mail by address, most especially zip code. So they have some pretty good character recognition technology, for both printed and handwritten addresses.

But did you know they keep a scanned image of your mail? U.S. law enforcement agencies - and sometimes intelligence agencies - can and do get a kind of search warrant, referred to as a mail cover, to see these images.

You can see these images too. The U.S.P.S. has a service called "Informed Delivery", part of their "Innovative Business Technology" program. You can sign up online to get an email every day, seven days a week (yes, even on Sunday) for the mail that has been scanned with your address on it. It's free. I've used this for some time.

Every morning I get an email with black and white digital images of my mail that had been scanned, probably the night before. Most of it is junk mail. It also contains color digital images of catalogs that I'll be receiving, that I'm sure the catalog merchandiser pays to have included. This is probably another revenue stream for the U.S.P.S. (and may be what pays for Informed Delivery).

The other day I had something extra in my Informed Delivery email. I had scanned images of the outsides of three other people's mail. These people weren't even on my street; two weren't even in my zip code.

Obviously some kind of glitch. But it wasn't a security hole I was expecting to find. That was naive on my part. If the FBI and the NSA find this information useful, someone who gets it by accident may as well.

Update 2023-12-13: This AM I got another ID email from the USPS with an image of someone else's mail in it, again not in my zip code. So this glitch isn't a one-off.

Update 2023-12-13: And for our friends in the Great White North: "Canada Post breaking law by gathering info from envelopes, parcels: watchdog".

Update 2023-12-13: Note that the images of mail, whether yours or someone else's, in your Informed Delivery email, are remote content: downloaded from a remote server and displayed, in an HTML-like manner, when you view the email. This means it can be removed or altered without accessing your copy of the email on your personal device. If you need to save these images for any reason, you need to save it in such a way that captures the remote images as well. Printing a hardcopy might be the best solution.

Update 2023-12-13: A friend, colleague, and former law enforcement officer asked me if the routing bar code printed by the USPS, and visible in the images in the ID email, for the other peoples' mail was the same as that on my mail. It's been a few years since I've had to eyeball bar codes of any kind, but I'm going to say "no".

Update 2023-12-13: Maybe this is obvious, but I thought I'd better say it: not subscribing to Informed Delivery will not prevent the USPS from scanning your mail, keeping the digital images, and showing them (deliberately or not) to other folks. At least by subscribing, you can see what other people might see.