If you have experienced mail delivery problems where you find yourself often getting skipped for days, I highly recommend you sign up for USPS Informed Delivery.
It sends an EMAIL digest of the images of the front of the first class mail that’s been scanned by the sorting machines for delivery to your address. Some pieces don’t fit the scanner so you’ll see a placeholder entry but you will generally see anything letter sized.
Prior to signing up, I was lucky if my regular carriers would attempt delivery two out of the six days they were required to in the average week. If there was anything near my mailbox, they’d just keep on trucking and nothing seemed to work to disabuse them of this habit.
The final straw was watching her bypass all but two houses on my street on a weekday and hightail it out of the neighbourhood.
I’ve got a feeling that my lazy regular carriers got tipped off when I signed up for Informed Delivery because ever since it went active, every piece of mail imaged in the EMAIL digest has shown up in the mailbox that day! And that was with a couple of days where there were obstacles near my mailbox which ordinarily would have been skipped unless it was the substitute drivers (this route is kind of weird…normally it’s the regular carriers that are good and the substitutes that suck but it’s the exact opposite for us).
Now, they do have a disclaimer saying it may take a few days for the mail to finally reach your box but they’ve not missed a delivery yet.
I’m seriously liking this…especially considering that I was completely out of ideas how to get these carriers to straighten up and fly right with a powerful union protecting them and a new Postmaster General of the US who seems hell-bent on destroying the Post Office.