A little while back I discovered a service that doesn’t cost anything and can sometimes be useful. Now my post office sends me a picture of what the letter carrier will be putting in my mailbox later that day.

I don’t know how long the US Postal Service has offered this service, but I just discovered it and I like it.

My snail-mail delivery is in the afternoon. Sometimes as early as 2:30 pm, sometimes as late as 5:30 pm. I don’t know why there is such a difference in time each day, but that’s how it happens.

There are a few situations where it would be nice to know ahead of time what the mailman is going to deliver that day:

Not to mention, I just like knowing what’s coming in the mail later today! With this service, all of that is taken care of.

Every morning between 7 and 7:30, I get an email from the post office. The email tells me what mail will be showing up in my mailbox later that day. The first part of the email looks like this:

Then below that, there are actual scans of the pieces of mail that are scheduled to be delivered that day. They look like this:

As you can see, this isn’t just an email “telling” me what mail is supposed to be delivered today – it actually shows me pictures of the mail pieces.

I had no idea that the US Postal Service actually created a scanned image of each piece of mail. But since they’re already doing that, might as well take advantage of it and have them notify you what to expect in your mailbox.

NOTE: this is only for letter-size mail pieces. Packages, magazines, etc. are not included in the notification.

To set this up for your address, go here: https://informeddelivery.usps.com/box/pages/intro/start.action. It’s completely free for US residents.

And I’m curious – have you heard of this service before? Or was this the first time you were made aware of it? Leave a comment below.