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There are mail services that do this - it's like a PO box, but not provided by the postal service and they will forward your mail to anywhere. These services ar
by lscotte 8y ago
There are mail services that do this - it's like a PO box, but not provided by the postal service and they will forward your mail to anywhere. These services are quite popular with RV folks and world sailors. Some will even scan your mail for you.
- imglorp 8y agoThat's still not name indirection, this is more like a 302, because your physical mail goes first to the company and then gets moved around.
- mbreese 8y agoBut the person who sent the mail doesn't know where it ends up. These services are exactly like what the parent was talking about -- someone sends a letter to a virtual address at the mail aggregator service, and the service then sends the letter on to your physical address. A 302 is like a letter that's been marked return to sender with a forwarding address. The original sender would then know the actual physical address.
- imglorp 8y agoTrue, 302 was the wrong analogy. But the good point here is that there are three kinds of indirection, not two.
- lisper 8y agoThe problem with forwarding is that the mail has to make two physical hops so it takes twice as long and requires twice the resources. This gets particularly annoying if I set the service up in, say, California and then move to New York.
- moosey 8y agoAre you sure it works this way? This seems like a very solvable problem.
- e1g 8y agoOver the holidays I researched all major providers of virtual addresses and can confirm that this is how it works. First your mail is routed to the provider’s local address or central warehouse, then they manually forward it to you. Some providers (incl the popular Earth Class Mail) operate as a hub-and-spoke network: all mail goes to their centralised distribution center, they process it and send it to you. This means if I buy something from a few blocks away, it will first have to Midwest then back to me.
- moosey 8y agoYuck.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoWould you be willing to share your research? It just so happens I’m looking for such a service currently. Email in profile.
- lisper 8y agoHow else could it possibly work given current constraints?
- toomuchtodo 8y ago> Over the holidays I researched all major providers of virtual addresses I’m okay with latency and eventual consistency. I just need an analog->digital funnel for paper mail when I’m thousands of miles from home.
- JetSpiegel 8y agoThat's like those MITM corporate proxies.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bootlooped 8y agoIdeally the US Postal Service could offer a service like this, then it wouldn't require any extra steps.
- lisper 8y agoYes. Exactly. Except that I would want a private entity to manage the database in the same way that name servers are done now because I want the private carriers to be able to access that info. And I would like the protocol to be open so that I could manage my own entry(s) if I chose to.