Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail

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.

I have one like that. I have the email first.last@gmail.com, and I have a very uncommon last name. Lo and behold, Google let some dude in Australia who happens to share my name sign up with firstlast@gmail.com. According to the docs the two should be equivalent, so they shouldn't have let him sign up, but they did... and now I get his email all the time. I have gotten job offers, bills from medical offices, even one follow up email from his therapist. And lots and lots of ads, of course. I have tried to let people know (when it's a real person contacting me) to let this guy know about the email situation, but either they don't reach out to him or he doesn't care. At this point I just delete all the emails meant for him without reading them, and figure if he misses out on a job offer or something... I tried my best.

Still, bizarre that the situation was allowed to occur in the first place by Google. Clearly they need to beef up their account creation checks a bit.

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.

My HN username is also my gmail. I've got most of the stuff you mentioned, including unencrypted copies of US tax returns (with SSN) and house buying paperwork.

> 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.

Same here. It's surprising that most of the services don't use double-opt in before sending emails.

Some day, I want to use an LLM to identify those emails and label them.

I had someone send me their entire credit report. Luckily I am not a scammer and I deleted it for them. They sent me an Amazon gift card to thank me for not stealing their PII.

I get DoorDash order notifications, Uber notifications, etc

I am not sure how they signed up with my email as I never got a sign up notification

Part of this also is because email / gmail is not case sensitive Jsmith@gmail.com is the same as jsmith@gmail.com. I see a lot of Jsmith vs jsmith (like how I actually use my email).

Nothing is getting stolen from me but not sure how this is actually working for people.

Everyone I know that made an email on the major free providers using just a common surname (and maybe initial) in some language are getting other people's communications.

It's like regular people don't use email unless forced to and forget what it is when giving it out...

Yep, same here. I've closed accounts folks opened with my email address, sent replies to humans confused why I haven't shown up to an appointment, etc. I just can't stop the flow of emails from these folks using my email address for seemingly legitimate business.

Google doesn't offer anything in the way of migration or consolidation of various email-linked data (e.g., store purchases) so I just let mail accumulate and delete everything manually once every few months.

I briefly had {{firstname}}@gmail.com back when it was invite only. Man that was a mistake.

This happens to me too - mostly from people in South America: i get their phone bills, receipts, etc... And now the knock on effect of spam is crushing my inbox. I know its spam related to these emails because its all in Spanish. I am thinking of abandoning my gmail to something new.

Physical junk mail is the USPS' bread and butter, so it's not surprising that they have no qualms about sending email spam either.

That would be an instant service cancellation for me.

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.

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.

Hand-delivering mail intended for my neighbors, that was mistakenly placed in my mailbox, is how I met most of my neighbors. The sloppy USPS is an important part of my social life.

> it's more of a hassle for me as my wife says "this should have arrived today"

Same here (minus the "stolen" part). Wife overlooks the disclaimer on the page saying "delivery soon" and assumes that today's photos should be of today's deliveries. Continually pointing that fact out has not (yet) dissuaded her from this belief of "today's photos equal today's deliveries"

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?

> My post office for a good year was horrendous about delivering me my neighbor's mail.

Mine still is. Misdelivered mail has done more to help me get to know my neighbors than anything else. It's pretty community-building.

No, these scans happen in sorting facilities in automated machinery far before delivery. A human still delivers the mail.

In my anecdotal experience, changes in how much of your neighbor's mail you get often ends up being due to a change to which individual carrier is delivering to your address. For over a decade growing up, we got our mail delivered by an exceptionally chill guy named Bill. As kids we'd get excited and run up when we saw him because he'd chat and joke with us, and he knew my parents by name and would chat with them often as well. We never got anyone else's mail from him, and no one ever got ours. Eventually, Bill got transferred to a different route, and the new person who delivered on our street would inexplicably stuff as many letters as he could into the insides of magazines going to a given address, and there was a high rate of getting our neighbors' mail inside of our magazines. When this first happened, my mother tried bring this up with him nicely, but nothing ended up changing. I can't remember how receptive he was to the feedback, but my mother didn't try to bring it up with him more than maybe once after that because she could tell it was a lost cause, and whenever it happened she'd roll her eyes and say that Bill would never make a mistake like that.

After college, I lived in an apartment for over four years where apparently the woman who had previously been in it switched to a different apartment in the same building (which was quite large, so I don't think I ever met her). In the first couple of weeks, we for a couple pieces of mail of hers that we'd leave with the doorman, and he'd give it to her (or maybe have it put in her mailbox instead), and this stopped happening after that for a while. A few years later, we started getting some mail for her again out of nowhere, and the first time I brought it down to the doorman, he mentioned that the person delivering mail to our building had switched recently. I have no clue why someone who hadn't delivered to the building before would be inconsistently delivering mail to her old address, but it basically never stopped happening during my remaining time there.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.