Going out of town for about five weeks. I can either put the mail on hold which I often due or ask a neighbor to accumulate it for me. I’d rather use the Hold method so that my neighbor isn’t inconvenienced…but I want to continue to get daily emails. Does anyone know if they can work together or if a Hold cancels out Informed Delivery?
You still get informed delivery.
But it’s clearly not accurate.
They say the mail is “delivered” but it actually ends up in one of those plastic bins.
That’s been my experience as well. When I put my mail on hold I still get the daily email showing the items that would have been delivered that day.
I’ve never heard of Informed Delivery before reading this thread, so I went to the USPS web site to look it up. Do you find it useful? Do you get a lot of scans of junk mail?
Just letter sized mail. Junk mail envelopes, yes. Advertising flyers, no.
It’s interesting, but not really very useful for me.
I suppose that if mailbox theft were an issue, it would be more useful.
As it is, it just lets me do the “Carnac” thing to my wife, when I predict that she will be getting a letter today…
I’ve had better luck than that but I’m sure that it depends on locations. I can think of only twice in the last year that an envelope sized item didn’t arrive the day it was supposed to. One arrived the next day and it took a couple days for the other for some reason. Perhaps it was delivered to the wrong mailbox as has been known to happen.
Packages are another story as they seem to vary quite a bit… some even arrive a day early than Informed Delivery says they will. It’s definitely worthwhile for me to at least be on the look-out for packages because some end up in the road-side box and some on the front steps.
BTW…thanks for the info on the OP.
I was specifically talking about the times when your mail is on hold.
Thanks for clarifying…now I understand your point.
It’s a good idea to set up an account with USPS for Informed Delivery, before scammers do it for you. The security requirements for setting up an initial account are not as tough as they should be. Once you set up the account, changes have to go through the email address used when the account was created.
I’ve found it very helpful for knowing when packages arrive, especially now that I’m home all the time.
Another reason I find Informed Delivery really useful is because since CV-19, I’ve had substitute newbie mail carriers, and they mis-deliver the mail a lot. I now know what mail is expected and what mail doesn’t make it.
I found “Informed Delivery” very helpful when we were on an extended trip (2–3 months) and we already had someone coming in to look after the house for other reasons. We would simply ask the house-sitter to forward any pieces of mail that looked particularly important.
Does that mean simply writing “Forward To: xxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xx xxxxx” and putting it back in the box… or would you use a new envelope and stamp?
We were out of the US during that time, so we had the house-sitter use a new envelope & stamp. Within the US, I think you can just set up temporary forwarding orders.
When you mail is on hold you will still get the informed delievery emails.