This is more or less a public service announcement, and only indirectly related to the subject of this journal.  I’m posting it here for those that haven’t heard about Informed Delivery, in case it would be of use to them.

One of the logistical issues for life plans such as ours is how to manage mail delivery, when you no longer have a permanent address and are planning for prolonged absences.  Our solution is to change our address to that of my sister, who has generously volunteered to manage our mail for us.

For shorter absences it is sufficient to just let the junk pile up and sift through all the trash for the one piece of correspondence you care about when you return.  Since this might not be timely enough when we plan to be gone for four or five months at a time, I’ve been coaching Elizabeth on how to recognize junk so she can round-file it, and to watch for possibly time-sensitive items so she can open them up and let us know if action is needed.

There are some obvious drawbacks to this solution, so I was delighted when I discovered Informed Delivery.  This is a free service provided by the USPS.  If you register for it, you receive a daily email with images of all of the letter-sized items scheduled for delivery to your address that day.  Larger items (catalogs, packages, etc) are not currently supported, but the plan is to add them in the future.

Below is a snippet of this morning’s Informed Delivery email I received.  The complete email included complete images of the envelopes for all five items in today’s delivery, including both ours and Elizabeth’s mail (it’s for the address, not the addressee).  The service also includes a web app that displays the entire last week’s deliveries, as protection against missing an email.

For us, this works perfectly.  I can keep responsibility for triaging our mail and let Elizabeth know what to scrap, what to keep for our return, and what to open.  We’ve been doing this for two weeks now, and one item was suspect.  She opened it, found that it was a bill, emailed a photo of it to me, and I paid it over the phone.  Perfect.  Amazing to me that it’s free.

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