MAIL CALL while out

Managing the Mail When Out Cruising

This is a way to see what mail is being delivered to your home while you are gone. The post office sends you a picture of each envelope being delivered. They do this every day.

While cruising in the Bahamas for a few months we received a letter from the IRS. It began, “you have 30 days to respond.”  Our son was keeping an eye out for this sort of mail, but he didn’t catch it.  In the end, it all worked out fine.   But now we have a way to check our mail daily right from the cockpit of our boat.  

It’s called “USPS Informed Delivery”.  Informed Delivery is a free electronic service that gives residential consumers the ability to digitally preview their letter-size mail and manage their packages that are scheduled to arrive.  Once you have subscribed you can access your personal dashboard.  From there you can choose to automatically get a daily email with pictures of the envelopes that are to be delivered that day.  If you don’t want these daily notifications, you can just use the dashboard to look at summary of what has been delivered.  The dashboard displays mailpiece images for a seven-day period, and package information displays for 15 days after each package has been delivered.

This service can even work if your mail is on “Hold” status at the post office.  The daily emails with digital images of your incoming mail do not require a great deal of data usage.  A typical email from Informed Delivery might be about 25KB in size. 

For packages or items with USPS Tracking®, you will be able to view the delivery status.  From the dashboard you can also provide USPS Delivery Instructions™ like rescheduling delivery or even changing the delivery address of a package. You can opt-in to receive separate email or text notifications with status updates for incoming packages.

Actually you can do a lot more from the website dashboard.  You can start or stop delivery of mail, set up passport appointments, fill out customs forms, track packages and send your carrier a message about the delivery of a package. The website is: https://informeddelivery.usps.com

We use this when we are gone cruising for a month or two, We have a neighbor collecet our mail. If we see something that needs looked at while we are gone, we have that neighbor open the envelope and send us a picture of the contents.  We can also let the neighbor know exactly when a package is going to be delivered to the house.