The US Postal Service is offering a free service that emails pictures of the first class mail you will be receiving in your physical mailbox. This can be useful if you want to know what mail is coming when traveling. It doesn’t work with circulars and other bulk mail but that seems fine.
It should be available in most areas soon and you can sign up for Informed Delivery here. Since I have been a long-time user of USPS Click-N-Ship, I just had to consent using my existing USPS account.
The picture below is the email I got today and it included 3 letters (only the first is shown). This service is possible as the sorting machines used to process mail already scan the front of letters for automated routing. Of course the inside of the letters are not included but it is slightly creepy that a government agency has this data for other agencies to possible mine. It is nice to see this service and I could see holding on to these emails to show when certain correspondences arrived.
