12 ms·

Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail

195 points by shayneo 1y ago

supernova87a 1y ago
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.
- user0648 1y ago
  In industry parlance this is called piggybacking when two items are scanned/processed at the same time, leading to inconsistencies.
mv4 1y ago
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.
fatih-erikli-cg 1y ago
[dead]
GauntletWizard 1y ago
I often also actually get other people's mail. Not every day, not even every month, but a couple times a year. I don't consider this a vulnerability, per se. This is the the usual level of uncertainty when dealing with physical objects.
ews 1y ago
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).
joecool1029 1y ago
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.
sroerick 1y ago
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.
- mystraline 1y ago
  You can solve this. Contact your federal senators and/or federal house reps, and tell them that USPS is sending pictures of other peoples' mail. Or if you dont want to do that, then contact USPS Office of Inspector General. uspsoig.gov/ The IG's are absolutely terrifying if you're on the wrong side. And you're 100% in the right, and they're in the wrong.
  - sejje 1y ago
    Terrifying? What was your experience with an IG?
    - Spooky23 1y ago
      Anytime you are a counterparty to Fed law enforcement, not fun.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - dlcarrier 1y ago
    It depends on which organization they're in. Plenty of them think of their job as legal PR, finding the loosest precedent they can to justify the organizations actions as accepted and legal. I've never understood why departments are reporting to themselves and not an independent inspector. Granted, politicians and the people they appoint will do anything to justify their actions, even across organizations, but it might open the door for political opponents to call each other out, on their bad actions.
xp84 1y ago
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.
- lxgr 1y ago
  Exactly: Readable to anyone (that can insert themselves into) the delivery path – which is only very few people. Just because there's other privacy issues with physical mail doesn't mean there ought to be even more when it comes to digital mail notifications.
  - xp84 1y ago
    The errors this article is about are about exactly one person selected basically at random getting to see something not for them. This seems to me about as scandalous as if an engineer looked at the raw traffic on a switch as ASCII text and occasionally sees the contents of a randomly-selected email. Absent the ability to predict and target this... shrug I don't know if it would be possible to have the ID service at all if one were not tolerant of one in a million times an envelope sticks to another one and ends up in someone else's image file.
- userbinator 1y ago
  On the other hand, opening mail not addressed to you is a very serious crime.
burnt-resistor 1y ago
It's possible that their eLOT, delivery point code, or some other auxiliary USPS metadata is messed up for themselves or their neighbor.
zoklet-enjoyer 1y ago
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.
rothos 1y ago
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.
- gnopgnip 1y ago
  Is your parents address your credit card billing address?
xeromal 1y ago
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.
pluto_modadic 1y ago
USPS usually sends me emails that reference a package, that the web dashboard doesn't display. or has packages stuck in their system from a thursday several months ago.
tonymet 1y ago
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.
- jonathanlydall 1y ago
  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.
booleandilemma 1y ago
I live in nyc and routinely receive other people's mail. I can only imagine the postal worker is dyslexic and not qualified for the job. It makes me wonder how much of my own mail is misdelivered.
duxup 1y ago
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.
- nemomarx 1y ago
  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?
  - duxup 1y ago
    Also, lots of emails. For some deliveries I get an email from the carrier, the company I bought the thing through, and someone who handles the actual thing on the other side of the retailer. App notifications. Like guies I get it ... Amusingly, for some obscure software, I write those emails ;)
  - pwg 1y ago
    > like Amazon reporting something is delivered the day before it actually shows up I feel like this one happens because the driver needs to meet quota today, so they scan the package delivered today, then when they are in the area tomorrow they actually deliver the package. Unfortunately, this makes "delivered today" not a reliable indicator of "I actually received the package today".
  - stetrain 1y ago
    That is an incentive for some shippers for sure, and it gets pushed down onto the (often overworked) delivery drivers. They have metrics on how many things they should deliver or attempt delivery each day and are sometimes judged harshly on those metrics. I have multiple times seen an "Out for Delivery" package switch to "Delivered" or "Delivery Attempted" at 10pm, presumably when the driver ended their shift and didn't want to be penalized for the undelivered packages. They usually showed up the following day.
reaperducer 1y ago
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.
- lxgr 1y ago
  > Envelopes are no different than post cards. Anyone can legally read them. Anyone with access to them. You can absolutely not read my postcards, for example, because you don't have a key for my mailbox. > As a reminder, there is no legal expectation of privacy for the outside of your mail. Just because it's legal doesn't make it a great thing to happen.
- kube-system 1y ago
  Did you not put in a change of address request? They automatically unenroll you from informed delivery.
  - JoshTriplett 1y ago
    You shouldn't put in a change of address; USPS sells those addresses as a revenue source. Just manually change your address with each service.
    - jerlam 1y ago
      In my experience, they're also not particularly reliable either. After filing a change of address form, I got quite a bit of mail still going to the old address. The forwarded mail, if it arrived at all, was significantly delayed. It also costs money after a period of time, then expires.
      - SoftTalker 1y ago
garciasn 1y ago
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.
- duped 1y ago
  So the way that this works has nothing to do with user experience. A long while ago, USPS automated the mail sorting at their distribution centers by taking photos of the mail. Anything that could be sorted automatically was, anything that fails falls back to humans to sort. Someone over at USPS had the brilliant idea to save the photos they were taking to sort the mail anyway and email it to people at the addresses that the mail was being sorted to, and to do it for free. It's basically repurposing a critical piece of infrastructure to give you a little QoL bonus with your mail, and we should be really thankful anyone thought to do it instead of complaining about what's lacking. Especially when policymakers use every attempt to defund it so they can get their ultimate goal of privatizing mail and package delivery.
- nottorp 1y ago
  > 1. I get the pictures DAYS before the actual mail (weekends ignored). Why?! I'd bet it's because the envelopes are photographed in some central location, the photos get sent at the speed of light but the physical envelopes only start getting to the last mile physical delivery people after.
  - dhosek 1y ago
    Indeed, there are regional sorting centers that then send to the local post offices to go to the carriers. Although what I find odd is that for residential delivery, I always get the mail the same day, only at my P.O. Box does the mail sometimes come 1–3 days later. If you look at the email, the promise isn’t “coming today” but “coming soon”.
- 1y ago
1a527dd5 1y ago
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.
- wcoenen 1y ago
  I once got an email about the funeral arrangements for somebody's mother. I know this person very well, because he uses my email address for everything. I know what internet subscription he has. I know where he bought his e-bike. Where he goes on holiday. Etc. And he's actually not the only person doing this! As far as I can tell, the only unusual thing about my Gmail is that it's relatively short and has no numbers. I suspect people just forget to add the digits at the end of their own address.
  - streetnoodles 1y ago
    I get a lot of random email for other people with the same first initial/last name as me. I had one specific person using my email for a lot of things. I just canceled her membership in a bowling league, and when the league reached out to ask why, I told them I have no idea who <her name> is. I stopped getting email meant for her after that.
  - kstrauser 1y ago
    Ugh, I could've written this. I have my HN username at one of the old webmail providers. I log in there about once a year to keep the account live (because said provider re-issues unused accounts after a while). Each time, I see another person's info. My name isn't freakishly unusual, but neither is it John Smith. I've used my personal experience in a design meeting where some newer PMs were IMO unreasonably sure that users wouldn't mistype their own email address. Oh, let me tell ya, they absolutely 100% do.
7e 1y ago
You have it easy! Occasionally USPS delivers me other people's mail!
- MisterTea 1y ago
  Same. I also dont get mail for days then suddenly my box is stuffed.
- manithree 1y ago
  USPS, FedEx, UPS, and Amazon all do this, but USPS is by far the worst here. There's a new (well, it was several years ago) townhome in the town to the west that has exactly the same street address as mine, just a different city and ZIP code (just one digit different). We got their mail, packages, etc. a LOT for years. The best was when we got home and FedEx had dropped of a set of 4 overnighted tires on our porch. The townhome is a rental, and sometimes, even when Amazon sends me a photo of their front porch, the townhome tenants claim they didn't get anything of ours. Either they're theives or they have a lot of porch pirates.
- lxgr 1y ago
  Same here, and Informed Delivery is actually a great feature for that (i.e. tracking whether one of my letters probably went to somebody else's mailbox again and whether it's worth asking the neighbors or looking on top of their mailboxes).
- LorenDB 1y ago
  Not just a USPS problem. Fedex dropped a package off at my neighbor's house the other day. Luckily I have good neighbors, so he brought it right over.
  - bxparks 1y ago
    Not just USPS and FedEx. UPS has dropped the last 3 of my packages to my neighbor's house. They try to be helpful though. They took pictures of the packages, sitting against various walls and doors that I didn't recognize at all. I had to guess which of my neighbors.
- 1y ago
somehnguy 1y ago
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.
- nemomarx 1y ago
  This is why some envelopes have a pattern on the inside for privacy, right? I thought that was standardized a while ago for anything official and important. Smaller card sized envelopes maybe not though
  - somehnguy 1y ago
    Yeah I believe so. Going through some of my old informed delivery emails I see a few with the crosshatch privacy pattern which seems to work reasonably well. I wonder if manipulating the image in some way (brightness, etc) may reduce that effect. I also have a number of mailings from my bank that include things like account balances & numbers, with no privacy pattern. So it seems hit or miss.
- 1970-01-01 1y ago
  Not really. It's good for snagging coupon codes, but not much else. Anything important will (should) be inside an envelope that is thick enough to block this trick.
  - somehnguy 1y ago
    Just like USPS should not send you images of other peoples mail, a lot of mail isn't in the type of envelope they should be. I'm looking at multiple bank statements where I can read balances. Another vector is the plastic window many envelopes have to show the addressee printed on the paper inside. I have another healthcare related letter I can read through that.
bpodgursky 1y ago
The government does a ton of genuinely bad privacy violations. Leaking pictures of the outside of an envelope is not one of them. Please stop getting people riled up about fake problems. You are pissing in the pool.
- tomrod 1y ago
  Genuinely curious -- was your comment directed towards the post author?
2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
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.
anonu 1y ago
90% of my snail mail is junk - so it really does not matter.
seiferteric 1y ago
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.
jasonthorsness 1y ago
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 https://www.usps.com/manage/informed-delivery.htm
- kccqzy 1y ago
  This system interacts poorly with the USPS Change-of-Address system. Whenever I move, I either get no emails about my mail or I get two emails per day with the same images. When I get no more emails, sometimes they will mail me a letter with a validation code to continue getting emails, but my experience is that I need to enter the same validation code multiple times to get access restored.
- joezydeco 1y ago
  I use this service. It's not that useful but sometimes it's good to see when an expected piece of mail is (roughly) going to arrive. From what I can tell this was a capability the USPS has had for a while, probably going back to the days of anthrax spores being sent to politicians. The USPS was probably directed to track where every piece of mail came from and image the outside of it. Informed Delivery was just a monetization of that system. Note that some pieces of mail trigger ads from third party companies.
  - jimt1234 1y ago
    This service is extremely valuable to me. I monitor my elderly mother's mail (she lives on her own, but several hours away), checking for anything important as well as obvious junk. Then, when I talk to her on the phone, we go through her mail together and I know how the conversation should go.
  - impish9208 1y ago
    > From what I can tell this was a capability the USPS has had for a while, probably going back to the days of anthrax spores being sent to politicians. The USPS was probably directed to track where every piece of mail came from and image the outside of it. I don’t think that’s accurate. They already had the scanning/imaging pipeline for routing and sorting. It wasn’t until later that they realized it’d be a good service to email the images to the recipients every morning – hence, Informed Delivery. It’s like a side-project that grew into a bonafide feature.
encom 1y ago
What's the point of a service that emails you pictures of your snail mail? You'll know about it anyway when it's delivered, and unlike a parcel, no action is required to receive it. Not snark, I'm legitimately asking - I'm probably missing something. I legitimately can't remember the last time I received actual mail in my mailbox. Everything goes to e-boks.dk.
- toast0 1y ago
  If you only rarely get mail in your box, you don't neee to check it regularly, unless something is coming. Alternately, if you're away and something important is arriving, you can ask someone to check in on it for you. Maybe they would normally just stack it all up, but this one is interesting enough from the envelope that you'd like them to take a look inside.
- smelendez 1y ago
  It's mostly only mildly useful for me. But I recently had a bank send me a new debit card as mine was about to expire, and the card never arrived. The bank was under the impression it was delivered a certain day, and I was able to tell them that I have Informed Delivery and as far as I could tell, the USPS never even attempted to deliver the card (or, as it happened, anything else that particular day). If you are waiting on a particular piece of mail it sometimes can be handy to know it'll be in your box soon instead of repeatedly checking the tracking or double-checking with the sender. If you don't receive mail every day, and your mailbox is at all exposed to the elements, it can remind you to check the box that day. And if your mail is delivered where other people have access to it—a spouse, kids, roommates, etc.—it can let you know to check in with them if you don't see something that they may have put in an unusual place.
  - madcaptenor 1y ago
    I started using it once I moved into an apartment complex where the mailboxes are not between the entrance and my apartment. If I know I have mail coming that is actually important I reroute to get the mail, which would be annoying to do every day.
- 1y ago
jchw 1y ago
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.
DamnInteresting 1y ago
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.
- phyzome 1y ago
  That would be an instant service cancellation for me.
- creer 1y ago
  Yep. Informed Delivery is mostly spam. (They recently added a note, something "no physical mail with this notice" - I guess others than me had started flagging them as lost.) Informed Delivery also highlights mail lost in (some part) of the delivery process. Such as delivered to the wrong PO Box or the wrong address, or who knows what other creative methods they might think of. Then there is a process to point that out and "trigger a search"... and get only automated "Eh, what are you gonna do" kinds of answers. Can't wait for being able to stop receiving paper entirely. Which will be a while because the other guys (the online guys) also love to build broken systems.
  - sitzkrieg 1y ago
    i lost my mail for a while when i was using informed delivery. i tried the lost mail report on a few hand written letters i saw scanned and never received. nothing happened lol i stopped using the email notifications and check it occasionally now
- dml2135 1y ago
  Physical junk mail is the USPS' bread and butter, so it's not surprising that they have no qualms about sending email spam either.
mNovak 1y ago
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.
iancmceachern 1y ago
Occasionally USPS sends me other people's mail More than Occasionally
PopePompus 1y ago
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)).
- dhosek 1y ago
  What I’ve observed from six years of informed delivery is that the sorting step that generates the images for informed delivery happens before the step that handles forwarding and return to sender. I’m not sure that any of the cases are that big of a privacy breach: It’s more inline with either getting the neighbor’s mail in your mailbox (which in my experience happens at about the same rate) or getting previous residents‘ mail in your mailbox (although my current carrier, after checking with me, intercepts most of these on her own initiative so I don‘t have to deal with them).
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
jabroni_salad 1y ago
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.
yencabulator 1y ago
So what? Occasionally USPS delivers other people's mail into my mailbox. Envelopes are not confidential, their content is. I don't open other people's mail (that would be a federal crime), I put it in the outbox.

195 points by shayneo 1y ago

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.

user0648 1y ago
In industry parlance this is called piggybacking when two items are scanned/processed at the same time, leading to inconsistencies.

mv4 1y ago

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.

fatih-erikli-cg 1y ago

[dead]

GauntletWizard 1y ago

I often also actually get other people's mail. Not every day, not even every month, but a couple times a year. I don't consider this a vulnerability, per se. This is the the usual level of uncertainty when dealing with physical objects.

ews 1y ago

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).

joecool1029 1y ago

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.

sroerick 1y ago

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.

mystraline 1y ago
You can solve this. Contact your federal senators and/or federal house reps, and tell them that USPS is sending pictures of other peoples' mail. Or if you dont want to do that, then contact USPS Office of Inspector General. uspsoig.gov/ The IG's are absolutely terrifying if you're on the wrong side. And you're 100% in the right, and they're in the wrong.
- sejje 1y ago
  Terrifying? What was your experience with an IG?
  - Spooky23 1y ago
    Anytime you are a counterparty to Fed law enforcement, not fun.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- dlcarrier 1y ago
  It depends on which organization they're in. Plenty of them think of their job as legal PR, finding the loosest precedent they can to justify the organizations actions as accepted and legal. I've never understood why departments are reporting to themselves and not an independent inspector. Granted, politicians and the people they appoint will do anything to justify their actions, even across organizations, but it might open the door for political opponents to call each other out, on their bad actions.

xp84 1y ago

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.

lxgr 1y ago
Exactly: Readable to anyone (that can insert themselves into) the delivery path – which is only very few people. Just because there's other privacy issues with physical mail doesn't mean there ought to be even more when it comes to digital mail notifications.
- xp84 1y ago
  The errors this article is about are about exactly one person selected basically at random getting to see something not for them. This seems to me about as scandalous as if an engineer looked at the raw traffic on a switch as ASCII text and occasionally sees the contents of a randomly-selected email. Absent the ability to predict and target this... shrug I don't know if it would be possible to have the ID service at all if one were not tolerant of one in a million times an envelope sticks to another one and ends up in someone else's image file.
userbinator 1y ago
On the other hand, opening mail not addressed to you is a very serious crime.

burnt-resistor 1y ago

It's possible that their eLOT, delivery point code, or some other auxiliary USPS metadata is messed up for themselves or their neighbor.

zoklet-enjoyer 1y ago

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.

rothos 1y ago

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.

gnopgnip 1y ago
Is your parents address your credit card billing address?

xeromal 1y ago

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.

pluto_modadic 1y ago

USPS usually sends me emails that reference a package, that the web dashboard doesn't display. or has packages stuck in their system from a thursday several months ago.

tonymet 1y ago

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.

jonathanlydall 1y ago
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.

booleandilemma 1y ago

I live in nyc and routinely receive other people's mail. I can only imagine the postal worker is dyslexic and not qualified for the job. It makes me wonder how much of my own mail is misdelivered.

duxup 1y ago

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.

nemomarx 1y ago
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?
- duxup 1y ago
  Also, lots of emails. For some deliveries I get an email from the carrier, the company I bought the thing through, and someone who handles the actual thing on the other side of the retailer. App notifications. Like guies I get it ... Amusingly, for some obscure software, I write those emails ;)
- pwg 1y ago
  > like Amazon reporting something is delivered the day before it actually shows up I feel like this one happens because the driver needs to meet quota today, so they scan the package delivered today, then when they are in the area tomorrow they actually deliver the package. Unfortunately, this makes "delivered today" not a reliable indicator of "I actually received the package today".
- stetrain 1y ago
  That is an incentive for some shippers for sure, and it gets pushed down onto the (often overworked) delivery drivers. They have metrics on how many things they should deliver or attempt delivery each day and are sometimes judged harshly on those metrics. I have multiple times seen an "Out for Delivery" package switch to "Delivered" or "Delivery Attempted" at 10pm, presumably when the driver ended their shift and didn't want to be penalized for the undelivered packages. They usually showed up the following day.

reaperducer 1y ago

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.

lxgr 1y ago
> Envelopes are no different than post cards. Anyone can legally read them. Anyone with access to them. You can absolutely not read my postcards, for example, because you don't have a key for my mailbox. > As a reminder, there is no legal expectation of privacy for the outside of your mail. Just because it's legal doesn't make it a great thing to happen.
kube-system 1y ago
Did you not put in a change of address request? They automatically unenroll you from informed delivery.
- JoshTriplett 1y ago
  You shouldn't put in a change of address; USPS sells those addresses as a revenue source. Just manually change your address with each service.
  - jerlam 1y ago
    In my experience, they're also not particularly reliable either. After filing a change of address form, I got quite a bit of mail still going to the old address. The forwarded mail, if it arrived at all, was significantly delayed. It also costs money after a period of time, then expires.
    - SoftTalker 1y ago

garciasn 1y ago

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.

duped 1y ago
So the way that this works has nothing to do with user experience. A long while ago, USPS automated the mail sorting at their distribution centers by taking photos of the mail. Anything that could be sorted automatically was, anything that fails falls back to humans to sort. Someone over at USPS had the brilliant idea to save the photos they were taking to sort the mail anyway and email it to people at the addresses that the mail was being sorted to, and to do it for free. It's basically repurposing a critical piece of infrastructure to give you a little QoL bonus with your mail, and we should be really thankful anyone thought to do it instead of complaining about what's lacking. Especially when policymakers use every attempt to defund it so they can get their ultimate goal of privatizing mail and package delivery.
nottorp 1y ago
> 1. I get the pictures DAYS before the actual mail (weekends ignored). Why?! I'd bet it's because the envelopes are photographed in some central location, the photos get sent at the speed of light but the physical envelopes only start getting to the last mile physical delivery people after.
- dhosek 1y ago
  Indeed, there are regional sorting centers that then send to the local post offices to go to the carriers. Although what I find odd is that for residential delivery, I always get the mail the same day, only at my P.O. Box does the mail sometimes come 1–3 days later. If you look at the email, the promise isn’t “coming today” but “coming soon”.
1y ago

1a527dd5 1y ago

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.

wcoenen 1y ago
I once got an email about the funeral arrangements for somebody's mother. I know this person very well, because he uses my email address for everything. I know what internet subscription he has. I know where he bought his e-bike. Where he goes on holiday. Etc. And he's actually not the only person doing this! As far as I can tell, the only unusual thing about my Gmail is that it's relatively short and has no numbers. I suspect people just forget to add the digits at the end of their own address.
- streetnoodles 1y ago
  I get a lot of random email for other people with the same first initial/last name as me. I had one specific person using my email for a lot of things. I just canceled her membership in a bowling league, and when the league reached out to ask why, I told them I have no idea who <her name> is. I stopped getting email meant for her after that.
- kstrauser 1y ago
  Ugh, I could've written this. I have my HN username at one of the old webmail providers. I log in there about once a year to keep the account live (because said provider re-issues unused accounts after a while). Each time, I see another person's info. My name isn't freakishly unusual, but neither is it John Smith. I've used my personal experience in a design meeting where some newer PMs were IMO unreasonably sure that users wouldn't mistype their own email address. Oh, let me tell ya, they absolutely 100% do.

7e 1y ago

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

MisterTea 1y ago
Same. I also dont get mail for days then suddenly my box is stuffed.
manithree 1y ago
USPS, FedEx, UPS, and Amazon all do this, but USPS is by far the worst here. There's a new (well, it was several years ago) townhome in the town to the west that has exactly the same street address as mine, just a different city and ZIP code (just one digit different). We got their mail, packages, etc. a LOT for years. The best was when we got home and FedEx had dropped of a set of 4 overnighted tires on our porch. The townhome is a rental, and sometimes, even when Amazon sends me a photo of their front porch, the townhome tenants claim they didn't get anything of ours. Either they're theives or they have a lot of porch pirates.
lxgr 1y ago
Same here, and Informed Delivery is actually a great feature for that (i.e. tracking whether one of my letters probably went to somebody else's mailbox again and whether it's worth asking the neighbors or looking on top of their mailboxes).
LorenDB 1y ago
Not just a USPS problem. Fedex dropped a package off at my neighbor's house the other day. Luckily I have good neighbors, so he brought it right over.
- bxparks 1y ago
  Not just USPS and FedEx. UPS has dropped the last 3 of my packages to my neighbor's house. They try to be helpful though. They took pictures of the packages, sitting against various walls and doors that I didn't recognize at all. I had to guess which of my neighbors.
1y ago

somehnguy 1y ago

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.

nemomarx 1y ago
This is why some envelopes have a pattern on the inside for privacy, right? I thought that was standardized a while ago for anything official and important. Smaller card sized envelopes maybe not though
- somehnguy 1y ago
  Yeah I believe so. Going through some of my old informed delivery emails I see a few with the crosshatch privacy pattern which seems to work reasonably well. I wonder if manipulating the image in some way (brightness, etc) may reduce that effect. I also have a number of mailings from my bank that include things like account balances & numbers, with no privacy pattern. So it seems hit or miss.
1970-01-01 1y ago
Not really. It's good for snagging coupon codes, but not much else. Anything important will (should) be inside an envelope that is thick enough to block this trick.
- somehnguy 1y ago
  Just like USPS should not send you images of other peoples mail, a lot of mail isn't in the type of envelope they should be. I'm looking at multiple bank statements where I can read balances. Another vector is the plastic window many envelopes have to show the addressee printed on the paper inside. I have another healthcare related letter I can read through that.

bpodgursky 1y ago

The government does a ton of genuinely bad privacy violations. Leaking pictures of the outside of an envelope is not one of them. Please stop getting people riled up about fake problems. You are pissing in the pool.

tomrod 1y ago
Genuinely curious -- was your comment directed towards the post author?

2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago

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.

anonu 1y ago

90% of my snail mail is junk - so it really does not matter.

seiferteric 1y ago

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.

jasonthorsness 1y ago

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 https://www.usps.com/manage/informed-delivery.htm

kccqzy 1y ago
This system interacts poorly with the USPS Change-of-Address system. Whenever I move, I either get no emails about my mail or I get two emails per day with the same images. When I get no more emails, sometimes they will mail me a letter with a validation code to continue getting emails, but my experience is that I need to enter the same validation code multiple times to get access restored.
joezydeco 1y ago
I use this service. It's not that useful but sometimes it's good to see when an expected piece of mail is (roughly) going to arrive. From what I can tell this was a capability the USPS has had for a while, probably going back to the days of anthrax spores being sent to politicians. The USPS was probably directed to track where every piece of mail came from and image the outside of it. Informed Delivery was just a monetization of that system. Note that some pieces of mail trigger ads from third party companies.
- jimt1234 1y ago
  This service is extremely valuable to me. I monitor my elderly mother's mail (she lives on her own, but several hours away), checking for anything important as well as obvious junk. Then, when I talk to her on the phone, we go through her mail together and I know how the conversation should go.
- impish9208 1y ago
  > From what I can tell this was a capability the USPS has had for a while, probably going back to the days of anthrax spores being sent to politicians. The USPS was probably directed to track where every piece of mail came from and image the outside of it. I don’t think that’s accurate. They already had the scanning/imaging pipeline for routing and sorting. It wasn’t until later that they realized it’d be a good service to email the images to the recipients every morning – hence, Informed Delivery. It’s like a side-project that grew into a bonafide feature.

encom 1y ago

What's the point of a service that emails you pictures of your snail mail? You'll know about it anyway when it's delivered, and unlike a parcel, no action is required to receive it. Not snark, I'm legitimately asking - I'm probably missing something. I legitimately can't remember the last time I received actual mail in my mailbox. Everything goes to e-boks.dk.

toast0 1y ago
If you only rarely get mail in your box, you don't neee to check it regularly, unless something is coming. Alternately, if you're away and something important is arriving, you can ask someone to check in on it for you. Maybe they would normally just stack it all up, but this one is interesting enough from the envelope that you'd like them to take a look inside.
smelendez 1y ago
It's mostly only mildly useful for me. But I recently had a bank send me a new debit card as mine was about to expire, and the card never arrived. The bank was under the impression it was delivered a certain day, and I was able to tell them that I have Informed Delivery and as far as I could tell, the USPS never even attempted to deliver the card (or, as it happened, anything else that particular day). If you are waiting on a particular piece of mail it sometimes can be handy to know it'll be in your box soon instead of repeatedly checking the tracking or double-checking with the sender. If you don't receive mail every day, and your mailbox is at all exposed to the elements, it can remind you to check the box that day. And if your mail is delivered where other people have access to it—a spouse, kids, roommates, etc.—it can let you know to check in with them if you don't see something that they may have put in an unusual place.
- madcaptenor 1y ago
  I started using it once I moved into an apartment complex where the mailboxes are not between the entrance and my apartment. If I know I have mail coming that is actually important I reroute to get the mail, which would be annoying to do every day.
1y ago

jchw 1y ago

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.

DamnInteresting 1y ago

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.

phyzome 1y ago
That would be an instant service cancellation for me.
creer 1y ago
Yep. Informed Delivery is mostly spam. (They recently added a note, something "no physical mail with this notice" - I guess others than me had started flagging them as lost.) Informed Delivery also highlights mail lost in (some part) of the delivery process. Such as delivered to the wrong PO Box or the wrong address, or who knows what other creative methods they might think of. Then there is a process to point that out and "trigger a search"... and get only automated "Eh, what are you gonna do" kinds of answers. Can't wait for being able to stop receiving paper entirely. Which will be a while because the other guys (the online guys) also love to build broken systems.
- sitzkrieg 1y ago
  i lost my mail for a while when i was using informed delivery. i tried the lost mail report on a few hand written letters i saw scanned and never received. nothing happened lol i stopped using the email notifications and check it occasionally now
dml2135 1y ago
Physical junk mail is the USPS' bread and butter, so it's not surprising that they have no qualms about sending email spam either.

mNovak 1y ago

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.

iancmceachern 1y ago

Occasionally USPS sends me other people's mail More than Occasionally

PopePompus 1y ago

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)).

dhosek 1y ago
What I’ve observed from six years of informed delivery is that the sorting step that generates the images for informed delivery happens before the step that handles forwarding and return to sender. I’m not sure that any of the cases are that big of a privacy breach: It’s more inline with either getting the neighbor’s mail in your mailbox (which in my experience happens at about the same rate) or getting previous residents‘ mail in your mailbox (although my current carrier, after checking with me, intercepts most of these on her own initiative so I don‘t have to deal with them).

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

jabroni_salad 1y ago

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.

yencabulator 1y ago

So what? Occasionally USPS delivers other people's mail into my mailbox. Envelopes are not confidential, their content is. I don't open other people's mail (that would be a federal crime), I put it in the outbox.