Are you receiving ALL of your mail? Now you can know for sure!
In the past, we’ve had a relatively difficult time in our area receiving our mail. For whatever reason, the carrier doesn’t know how to read the address on the box or post, she’s trying to reduce her time delivering, doesn’t feel like stopping today, maybe she has to pee by the time she reaches our house, but in any case, we hardly ever get ALL of our mail on time (or at all).
Informed Delivery
I know this for a fact, because I signed up for a rather interesting free service called Informed Delivery. Did you know that literally every single piece of mail that passes through the post office is photographed? Now, you can have photographs of all of your mail sent to you in a daily digest to inform you of what is in your mailbox before you go out to the mailbox to get it.
This is rather handy information to know, for example, today I DIDN’T receive five pieces of mail, three of those were bank statements, one was a credit card and another a piece of junk mail.
I started to wonder whether our mail is being thrown out like this one:
Or like this one who was caught dumping bins of mail into a dumpster:
So I spent literally four hours on the phone calling to voice my concern about why the carrier failed to deliver, why she literally drove PAST my mailbox, never even slowing down as I watched.
They assured me they’d look into it. We’ll see, we recently had our mail on hold for seven days and when we returned we received ONE single envelope. That was our “mail” for an entire week- 1 single envelope.
Apparently, none of the local restaurants offered any flyers/discounts, no real estate or car sales promotions over the 4th of July, etc. I found that rather hard to believe since an average day is 5-7 pieces of mail for our home.
Our biggest concern was not that we wouldn’t receive our bills on time and have to pay late fees, it was that our mail was potentially being improperly discarded, opening us up to identity theft, additional credit cards being created in our name, and the loss of years of hard work ensuring that we have decent credit scores.
Since signing up for the free service, we’ve discovered 27 pieces of mail that have FAILED to be delivered (at all!) to our business and home. A couple phone calls to our local post office and the issue was remedied. Several months later, it has become extremely rare for an item displayed in our informed delivery notification to not arrive on time.
How to Sign Up for Informed Delivery
By the way, if you’d like, you can sign up for Informed Delivery Here, it’s free. The service allows you to digitally preview your mail and manage packages that are due to be delivered shortly.
This free service provides you with an image of the exterior of every piece of mail that is processed through USPS automated equipment (DPS). At this time hand sorted mail pieces, otherwise known as non-machinable, are not included in the service. If you prefer to download their free app to your smartphone you can receive notifications of delivery as well.
In addition to the informed delivery notifications, we also installed a locking mailbox that is large enough to allow small packages to be delivered, but prevents anyone from being able to reach into the box without a key.
