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Reading emails is a lot easier than scanning packages that people get mad at not arriving on time. I'm sure there's some inspection. But the other companies are

• bmpafa 9y ago
  ^^ this. even cursory x-ray inspection is a huge undertaking. I once worked for the USPS in a Middle Eastern country, and it was our job to assist local customs officials as they scanned / inspected every piece of inbound mail. They ran each piece through an x-ray, and whenever they spotted a banned item (liquor bottles, sex toys--hell, they even inspected optical discs to make sure they weren't porn), they opened the package and confiscated it. We cleared about 1 mail truck of mail every night, and it took 5-10 hours. No way that's sustainable on the scale of domestic mail throughput.
  • code_duck 9y ago
    What about scanning for moderate amounts of items that could be automatically detected by machines, like cash, or assessing groups of packages in bulk for drugs or explosives with canines?