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How much would you pay for this? Would you also accept a small delay to receiving mail? With enough capital it would be fairly straightforward to provide a for

How much would you pay for this? Would you also accept a small delay to receiving mail? With enough capital it would be fairly straightforward to provide a forwarding service for this. You could also have spam filters or reject mail from specific senders, provide scans of the outside of the letters, specific delivery dates etc. Given how we are ordering more and more things online nowadays this could be a very exciting opportunity.

lisper 8y ago
I don't want forwarding. If I move from California to New York I want mail sent to me from New York not to have to traverse the country twice to get to me.
- slightwinder 8y ago
  That would only work if all post-services would work together. Otherwise it would still be relayed to your redirection-service first, where it receives a new address-label and gets send out again. I think those services exist in some countries, but not from postal services themself, so delivery-time is still rather slow.
  - nybble41 8y ago
    > That would only work if all post-services would work together. That's the idea: the redirection would be handled by the carriers, not some third party. In place of the current system of (a) scan address; (b) route package; (c) deliver package the process would be (a) scan recipient ID; (b) translate ID to address; (c) route package; (d) deliver package. The address lookup should be completely automated and introduce no discernable additional latency in the mail delivery. It could even be implemented as a special case of the address normalization step carriers already perform.
    - slightwinder 8y ago
      What I mean is, in many countries there all are third-parties, because there is no monopoly on postal services anymore. So they must cooperate in some way and share the redirection-database. And this means implementing this would be very very complicate and take a long time, because companies are not very eager for cooperation until some strong reason exists. And this feature, as nice as it would be to have, is not really a strong reason for cooperation. In the first place there is not even enough data to know whether the huge investment would be justified.
      - nybble41 8y ago
        Don't these private carriers already share address databases, or outsource address lookup to third parties with incentives to find the right location for any valid address? Adding a level of indirection to that existing system wouldn't take very much effort. Or do you have one address for UPS deliveries and a different address for FedEx deliveries? (Substitute local carrier names as appropriate.) While that's more work—and pointlessly complex IMHO—you'd just need to set up one ID per carrier and give the correct ID, as opposed to the carrier-specific address.
        slightwinder 8y ago
        I don't think they share any information, or maintain address-databases. Usually there are official geodata (maps, postal codes) and customers normally don't report back their own data to the government. Anyway, logistic of postal sercice is highly optimized and well defined, and changing anything is not as simple as hacking some script somewhere.
        nybble41 8y ago
        If they can't easily implement something as simple as a mapping from IDs to addresses, that seems less like "highly optimized and well defined" and more like "inflexible, cobbled-together mess". I don't doubt that what they're doing works well for the situations they've encountered in the past, but situations change and they need to be able to adapt. Anyway, a shortcut to implementing indirection for these less-organized postal services you're describing would be to look up the recipient's ID when the parcel first enters the system and affix a label with the full address. That way the sender doesn't need to know the address and everything else about the delivery can stay the same.
- albertgoeswoof 8y ago
  This would be abstracted from the user, and you could have fulfilment in both locations. Moving state is also kind of an edge case for most people. It would make more sense to pilot it in a smaller country first, the US is huge and sparsely populated.

lisper 8y ago

I don't want forwarding. If I move from California to New York I want mail sent to me from New York not to have to traverse the country twice to get to me.

slightwinder 8y ago
That would only work if all post-services would work together. Otherwise it would still be relayed to your redirection-service first, where it receives a new address-label and gets send out again. I think those services exist in some countries, but not from postal services themself, so delivery-time is still rather slow.
- nybble41 8y ago
  > That would only work if all post-services would work together. That's the idea: the redirection would be handled by the carriers, not some third party. In place of the current system of (a) scan address; (b) route package; (c) deliver package the process would be (a) scan recipient ID; (b) translate ID to address; (c) route package; (d) deliver package. The address lookup should be completely automated and introduce no discernable additional latency in the mail delivery. It could even be implemented as a special case of the address normalization step carriers already perform.
  - slightwinder 8y ago
    What I mean is, in many countries there all are third-parties, because there is no monopoly on postal services anymore. So they must cooperate in some way and share the redirection-database. And this means implementing this would be very very complicate and take a long time, because companies are not very eager for cooperation until some strong reason exists. And this feature, as nice as it would be to have, is not really a strong reason for cooperation. In the first place there is not even enough data to know whether the huge investment would be justified.
    - nybble41 8y ago
      Don't these private carriers already share address databases, or outsource address lookup to third parties with incentives to find the right location for any valid address? Adding a level of indirection to that existing system wouldn't take very much effort. Or do you have one address for UPS deliveries and a different address for FedEx deliveries? (Substitute local carrier names as appropriate.) While that's more work—and pointlessly complex IMHO—you'd just need to set up one ID per carrier and give the correct ID, as opposed to the carrier-specific address.
      - slightwinder 8y ago
        I don't think they share any information, or maintain address-databases. Usually there are official geodata (maps, postal codes) and customers normally don't report back their own data to the government. Anyway, logistic of postal sercice is highly optimized and well defined, and changing anything is not as simple as hacking some script somewhere.
        nybble41 8y ago
        If they can't easily implement something as simple as a mapping from IDs to addresses, that seems less like "highly optimized and well defined" and more like "inflexible, cobbled-together mess". I don't doubt that what they're doing works well for the situations they've encountered in the past, but situations change and they need to be able to adapt. Anyway, a shortcut to implementing indirection for these less-organized postal services you're describing would be to look up the recipient's ID when the parcel first enters the system and affix a label with the full address. That way the sender doesn't need to know the address and everything else about the delivery can stay the same.
albertgoeswoof 8y ago
This would be abstracted from the user, and you could have fulfilment in both locations. Moving state is also kind of an edge case for most people. It would make more sense to pilot it in a smaller country first, the US is huge and sparsely populated.