I like the idea of parsing USPS Informed Delivery emails (a lot of people I encounter still don't know that this service exists). Maybe I'll make something to alert me when my checks are finally arriving!
I like the idea of parsing USPS Informed Delivery emails (a lot of people I encounter still don't know that this service exists). Maybe I'll make something to alert me when my checks are finally arriving!
This part was galling to me; somewhere in the USPS, the data about what mailpieces/packages are arriving soon exist in a very concise form, and they templatize an email and send it to me, after which I can parse the email with simple+brittle regexes or forward the emails to a relatively (environmentally-)expensive LLM or so.... but if they'd made the information available with an API or RSS feed, or attached the json payload to the email in the first place, I could get away without parsing.
It would indeed be nice to have a recipient/consumer-side API!
I don't think it'll ever happen. Really the only valid use-case would be for people to hack together something for themselves (like we are discussing)... They don't want to allow developers to create applications on top of this as a 3rd party, as informed delivery itself has to carefully navigate privacy laws and it could be disastrous.
In Finland our own USPS (Posti) has their own mobile application that does delivery notifications. They've been directing users towards the app pretty heavily and deprecating other interfaces.
You can still get the parcel ID and use a public-ish web API to get tracking information on a rough level ("in transit", "being delivered") without exact address information.