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Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail

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Re: Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail

#121

Post by joecool1029 »

I have an even better version. I rent a small PO box and I keep getting the condo management company's mail meant for the next PO box over. Interestingly enough while informed delivery worked in the pilot program, they kicked it out when it was launched because my box is commercial. So I don't know when mail is inbound and just have to check when I think there's something.

I sometimes only check the box once a month, and it's not uncommon it's full of bill pay checks for people's rent lol.

Re: Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail

#122

Post by saghm »

sitzkrieg wrote: post #112
wombatpm wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My house number is 110. My neighbor at 116 bought a condo in Florida. Why do I know this? Because for 3 months I was getting all of his HOA correspondence. People make mistakes. Technology just allows people to make mistakes in seconds that would have taken minutes before.

yea but getting your address wrong in a major purchase is a dipshit move.

I wouldn't be shocked if they just had messy handwriting, and someone misread their "0" for a "6". It doesn't seem like it would be _that_ hard to accidentally close the loop a little low.

Re: Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail

#123

Post by sroerick »

I posted this on the Substack, but

At one point, I entered the wrong address when I was forwarding my mail. As a result, I got my mail sent to a strangers PO Box. As a side effect, I then began to receive Informed Delivery for this stranger to this very day.

In addition, I once had the Post Office disable my address. It was like a 101B address and they didn’t consider it legitimate with the city. As a result, they were unable to forward mail when I left that house, and once again, and they were unable to disable the informed consent for this house.

As a result of this, I see every piece of mail that two separate strangers receive. I have gone to the post office a half dozen times in the last 5 years to try to disable this, and have repeatedly been told there is absolutely nothing that can be done.

Re: Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail

#124

Post by DavidSJ »

wcoenen wrote: post #101
1a527dd5 wrote: post #10

I have a version of this; I have the email {{popular-asian-surname}}@gmail.com and I've seen _everything_. I've had many many bank statements from India. I've had someone in California order a brand new BMW and got the details for collection. I've had paypal invoices and statements (this is one funny because they refuse to action the delink). I used to reach out and tell them I didn't sign up for their service. But h…

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 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.

I was expecting this person to be you.

Re: Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail

#125

Post by mnw21cam »

saghm wrote: post #120
Y_Y wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get credit card stuff and credit report stuff from bozos with similar nanes to me. I used to try to inform them, they won't let me. The worst are Experian, who won't let me interact with them at all, because I can't prove I'm the person or people who've been mistakenly using my email address.

You'd think that they would be willing to interact with someone sending emails from the same address they're spamming!

My stock reply to this used to be that you can send emails from anyone - who the email is sent from is not authenticated.

It's a little less true now with some of the newer protections, but only today I received a fairly subtle spam/scam supposedly from the main email address of a major retailer, so I think it's still sensible to never every trust the "From:" part of an email.

Re: Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail

#126

Post by Uvix »

bxparks wrote: post #118
jer0me wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make a filter for emails that contain “ñ”

Haha. Do you have a similar character for Japanese? Some douche bag added my GitHub email address into some Japanese spam farm a few weeks ago. I am now flooded with Japanese spam. I don't read or speak a word of Japanese.

は or す would be my suggestions.

Re: Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail

#127

Post by United857 »

1a527dd5 wrote: post #10

I have a version of this; I have the email {{popular-asian-surname}}@gmail.com and I've seen _everything_. I've had many many bank statements from India. I've had someone in California order a brand new BMW and got the details for collection. I've had paypal invoices and statements (this is one funny because they refuse to action the delink). I used to reach out and tell them I didn't sign up for their service. But h…

I have an extremely common first and last name and my email address is first.last@gmail.

I get my fair share of misaddressed mail but it doesn’t help that I share the same name as the CEO of a major hotel chain’s timeshare business so I’ve getting tons of complaints about that :/

Re: Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail

#128

Post by Rodeoclash »

1a527dd5 wrote: post #10

I have a version of this; I have the email {{popular-asian-surname}}@gmail.com and I've seen _everything_. I've had many many bank statements from India. I've had someone in California order a brand new BMW and got the details for collection. I've had paypal invoices and statements (this is one funny because they refuse to action the delink). I used to reach out and tell them I didn't sign up for their service. But h…

I've owned the domain name richardson.co.nz for some 25 years now and since then someone started a Richardson's realestate and registered richardsons.co.nz (note the additional "s").

I left the catch-all on my domains email going for a year or two before I had to disable it. The sheer amount of house blueprints, sensitive information about transfers etc was overwhelming.

Re: Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail

#129

Post by timewizard »

impish9208 wrote: post #114
joezydeco wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mon…

> 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. I don’t think that’s accurate. They already had the scanning/imaging pipeline for routing and sorting. It wasn’t until later that they realized it’d be a good serv…

No. It goes back to the 1990s when we used Data Entry Operators to key mail details that could not be read by OCR. This is all so the mail goes into the truck sorted. That is the most important part of the mail delivery operation.

The fact that you can get pictures from this system is the innovation but imaging has existed for much longer than this product.

Re: Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail

#130

Post by mystraline »

sroerick wrote: post #123

I posted this on the Substack, but At one point, I entered the wrong address when I was forwarding my mail. As a result, I got my mail sent to a strangers PO Box. As a side effect, I then began to receive Informed Delivery for this stranger to this very day. In addition, I once had the Post Office disable my address. It was like a 101B address and they didn’t consider it legitimate with the city. As a result, they we…

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.

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