USPS Informed Delivery
-
USPS Informed Delivery is supposed to be a portal where you can see incoming mail, packages headed your way and their estimated delivery dates and other such information. In reality, it is the worst government website since healthcare.gov.
I noticed it as an option a year or so ago when I was checking tracking on something we needed to finish a project. I sign up, they verify I am who I say I am (which IIRC involved me answering several questions that anyone could Google, so who knows if someone else has setup Informed Delivery on your address without your knowledge) and in theory I should get an email every morning when they are done with the mail sort (this will be important later) that shows me what mail is arriving that day, along with any packages and their estimated delivery dates.
So let's start with login. I generally keep a tab open with https://informeddelivery.usps.com in it so I can easily check package progress. We get a lot of stuff delivered here. I like to stay on top of it. Almost every time I go to the tab it has signed me out due to non-activity. You stay signed in for less than 10 minutes. As best I can tell there is no way to change this option. I am the only person who uses my computers. I should have the option to just stay signed in. Make the default to log me out after 5 minutes if you want, but let me override it for computers that I do not share. I would much prefer to stay logged in.
Sometimes I will come back to a tab and it will not show me to be logged out. The last information I had pulled up will still be there. Any navigation will cause it to pop a modal that says I will be logged out in 60 seconds unless I click a button to affirm I am still active. Clicking this will usually just throw an error that causes me to have to refresh the page to clear. If I close my laptop and put it to sleep before the page has a chance to log me out it usually causes this. This also happens literally constantly on the mobile version of the page. If you come back to an open tab on mobile you might as well refresh because something will go wrong.
So, it logs me out. You would think it would return me to the login page, right? You would be wrong. It drops me on the landing page, that does not have a login on it. I have to click through to the login page. That's retarded. Why is the login page a separate page from landing? Why am I dropped on landing when I was previously logged in?
So I try to login. Sorry homey, it says they have updated their page and I have to refresh in order to login. Now, unless they are pushing to production 10 times a day or more, then I am guessing that there is a time out on this and it does not actually do anything to compare client version to server version. They took the easy way out and just decided to annoy their users constantly.
Frequently when I have jumped through all of the hoops, refreshed my page 2-3 times in order to be able to login, and attempt to login it will throw errors that force me to close the page and open it in a new tab.
Okay, so now I am logged in. I should be able to view my mail and packages, right? Well, no. You might be able to. At least once a week it will show me the mail I received yesterday instead of what is coming today. Or it will show me mail from yesterday interlaced with mail coming today and I have to remember what came yesterday and mentally cull it. It also always shows some variation of this:
(snip from yesterday)
(snip from Monday)
(Saturday)
(Friday)
You get the idea. So why doesn't it have scans of these mailpieces? Who fucking knows. I at first through that perhaps they didn't get scanned, but if they were not scanned then how does it know about them to even display this?
Remember that email you are supposed to get in the morning after they are done processing mail? Yeah, that email is somewhat worthless. If you compare it to the website there are frequently discrepancies. The website almost always has more mail than the email digest they send to you. I assume this is probably operator error. The mail clerks do something that says they are done processing which triggers the batch process that sends out the email and then more mail comes in and gets processed and sent out. So the email is only a partial representation of what is actually supposed to be sent out. You have to check the website to see everything. Or...mostly everything, because there are always items that they do not have images for so you have NFC what they are. And also it frequently fucks up and shows you everything from the day before.
Back in January we had a few days of bitter cold that were so bad that they suspended mail service. You would think that would be something they could send out a notification for, right?
Nope. I continued getting emails showing what mail was going to be delivered that day, but was not actually going to be delivered. This put notifications a couple of days ahead of what was actually coming due to the backlog and this took a week to clear from the system so that it reflected reality.
So the emails are supposed to also show you what packages are coming that day. But they don't. I think that whatever they do to show that they are done with mail sorting triggers the email, that sometimes happens before they are actually done with mail sort, but before they ever even start the package sort. The email I get almost never shows any packages being delivered that day. You pretty much have to login to the site to see what is being delivered that day.
I could go on and on and on about all the shit wrong with Informed Delivery. I will try to update this as I remember more things, but it is everything you would expect in
's from a USPS website.
-
lol you're so old you're griping about the post office
-
Sounds almost as bad as PostNord in Sweden. The state owned company that delivers mail and parcels, and thoroughly suck at doing so. Tough PostNord seems to actually have gotten their e-services somewhat in order. They mostly update in a timely manner, and mostly show real deliveries, and mostly have the right place to go pick the parcels up. (No service to see what mail you've got coming though).
But the drivers have a nasty habit of dropping packages on the highway, being hostile to the point of beating other people up and such.
They've gotten the nickname PostMord , which isntead of the regular PostNorth, means PostMurder.
-
@Captain said in USPS Informed Delivery:
lol you're so old you're griping about the post office
lol he mad
-
@Carnage said in USPS Informed Delivery:
They mostly update in a timely manner, and mostly show real deliveries, and mostly have the right place to go pick the parcels up. (No service to see what mail you've got coming though).
One more
on USPS packages. Occasionally you will get a tracking number from someone saying they have shipped your package. A couple of days go by, you check to see where it is and it still shows as "Shipping Label Created, USPS Awaiting Item Pre-Shipment". Now, you would think that means they have not yet shipped your package, right? Now always. Sometimes the package will be delivered before it ever shows on tracking at all. Then a week later you will get 10 notifications when everything finally updates.
-
@Polygeekery said in USPS Informed Delivery:
@Carnage said in USPS Informed Delivery:
They mostly update in a timely manner, and mostly show real deliveries, and mostly have the right place to go pick the parcels up. (No service to see what mail you've got coming though).
One more
on USPS packages. Occasionally you will get a tracking number from someone saying they have shipped your package. A couple of days go by, you check to see where it is and it still shows as "Shipping Label Created, USPS Awaiting Item Pre-Shipment". Now, you would think that means they have not yet shipped your package, right? Now always. Sometimes the package will be delivered before it ever shows on tracking at all. Then a week later you will get 10 notifications when everything finally updates.Yup. It's usually been 24 hours behind on packages I get from them with tracking numbers.
-
@SlackerD said in USPS Informed Delivery:
Yup. It's usually been 24 hours behind on packages I get from them with tracking numbers.
Well, those batch card reader jobs are only run once a day!
-
@SlackerD the other more frequent tracking fuckup I see from USPS is when you get the "Shipping Label Created, USPS Awaiting Item Pre-Shipment" notification. Nothing happens. Then you get them all at once when the package is out for delivery. 3-4 days of tracking all comes through at once.
-
@Gąska said in USPS Informed Delivery:
@Captain said in USPS Informed Delivery:
lol you're so old you're griping about the post office
lol he mad
Hmm - I got a different list:
-
@PJH who the hell uses @shadowmod to downvote? It's one thing to hide downvoters globally, but to use a (presumably shared) alt mod account? That's a next level saltiness. Are things really that bad between mods here, or what?
-
@Gąska said in USPS Informed Delivery:
@PJH who the hell uses @shadowmod to downvote things?
I do when I'm anonymising the person who was actually there.
-
@PJH I see. What's the point though? @boomzilla is anonymous enough.
-
@Gąska said in USPS Informed Delivery:
presumably shared
A side note - it's not shared - it still has my password on it from Discourse.
-
-
@Polygeekery said in USPS Informed Delivery:
Sometimes the package will be delivered before it ever shows on tracking at all.
#metoo
-
@Gąska said in USPS Informed Delivery:
@boomzilla is anonymous enough.
No. He's @boomzilla. Not anonymous at all!
-
-
@Gąska "Remember, remember, the thirteenth of March" doesn't have the same ring to it.
-
@Polygeekery remember, remember, the lawn defender!
-
@Polygeekery I know this isn't a help thread, but I've found that on sites that like to force you to log out, a "auto refresh page" plugin works wonders.
Unless the page breaks when you refresh too, in which case you're SOL
-
-
@Polygeekery said in USPS Informed Delivery:
@Carnage said in USPS Informed Delivery:
They mostly update in a timely manner, and mostly show real deliveries, and mostly have the right place to go pick the parcels up. (No service to see what mail you've got coming though).
One more
on USPS packages. Occasionally you will get a tracking number from someone saying they have shipped your package. A couple of days go by, you check to see where it is and it still shows as "Shipping Label Created, USPS Awaiting Item Pre-Shipment". Now, you would think that means they have not yet shipped your package, right? Now always. Sometimes the package will be delivered before it ever shows on tracking at all. Then a week later you will get 10 notifications when everything finally updates.USPS tracking has always been shit. Unlike UPS and FedEx, who seem to be able to update tracking within a few minutes of realtime, USPS tracking numbers rarely seem to be updated until after the package is delivered to their final destination.
I've been using Informed Delivery for about a year now and it seems to work reasonably well, as long as you realize that it's the Post Office you're dealing with and aren't overly anal about expecting it to work perfectly.
-
@Polygeekery said in USPS Informed Delivery:
USPS Informed Delivery is supposed to be a portal where you can see incoming mail, packages headed your way and their estimated delivery dates and other such information. In reality, it is the worst government website since healthcare.gov.
I noticed it as an option a year or so ago when I was checking tracking on something we needed to finish a project. I sign up, they verify I am who I say I am (which IIRC involved me answering several questions that anyone could Google, so who knows if someone else has setup Informed Delivery on your address without your knowledge) and in theory I should get an email every morning when they are done with the mail sort (this will be important later) that shows me what mail is arriving that day, along with any packages and their estimated delivery dates.
So let's start with login. I generally keep a tab open with https://informeddelivery.usps.com in it so I can easily check package progress. We get a lot of stuff delivered here. I like to stay on top of it. Almost every time I go to the tab it has signed me out due to non-activity. You stay signed in for less than 10 minutes. As best I can tell there is no way to change this option. I am the only person who uses my computers. I should have the option to just stay signed in. Make the default to log me out after 5 minutes if you want, but let me override it for computers that I do not share. I would much prefer to stay logged in.
Sometimes I will come back to a tab and it will not show me to be logged out. The last information I had pulled up will still be there. Any navigation will cause it to pop a modal that says I will be logged out in 60 seconds unless I click a button to affirm I am still active. Clicking this will usually just throw an error that causes me to have to refresh the page to clear. If I close my laptop and put it to sleep before the page has a chance to log me out it usually causes this. This also happens literally constantly on the mobile version of the page. If you come back to an open tab on mobile you might as well refresh because something will go wrong.
So, it logs me out. You would think it would return me to the login page, right? You would be wrong. It drops me on the landing page, that does not have a login on it. I have to click through to the login page. That's retarded. Why is the login page a separate page from landing? Why am I dropped on landing when I was previously logged in?
So I try to login. Sorry homey, it says they have updated their page and I have to refresh in order to login. Now, unless they are pushing to production 10 times a day or more, then I am guessing that there is a time out on this and it does not actually do anything to compare client version to server version. They took the easy way out and just decided to annoy their users constantly.
Frequently when I have jumped through all of the hoops, refreshed my page 2-3 times in order to be able to login, and attempt to login it will throw errors that force me to close the page and open it in a new tab.
Okay, so now I am logged in. I should be able to view my mail and packages, right? Well, no. You might be able to. At least once a week it will show me the mail I received yesterday instead of what is coming today. Or it will show me mail from yesterday interlaced with mail coming today and I have to remember what came yesterday and mentally cull it. It also always shows some variation of this:
(snip from yesterday)
(snip from Monday)
(Saturday)
(Friday)
You get the idea. So why doesn't it have scans of these mailpieces? Who fucking knows. I at first through that perhaps they didn't get scanned, but if they were not scanned then how does it know about them to even display this?
Remember that email you are supposed to get in the morning after they are done processing mail? Yeah, that email is somewhat worthless. If you compare it to the website there are frequently discrepancies. The website almost always has more mail than the email digest they send to you. I assume this is probably operator error. The mail clerks do something that says they are done processing which triggers the batch process that sends out the email and then more mail comes in and gets processed and sent out. So the email is only a partial representation of what is actually supposed to be sent out. You have to check the website to see everything. Or...mostly everything, because there are always items that they do not have images for so you have NFC what they are. And also it frequently fucks up and shows you everything from the day before.
Back in January we had a few days of bitter cold that were so bad that they suspended mail service. You would think that would be something they could send out a notification for, right?
Nope. I continued getting emails showing what mail was going to be delivered that day, but was not actually going to be delivered. This put notifications a couple of days ahead of what was actually coming due to the backlog and this took a week to clear from the system so that it reflected reality.
So the emails are supposed to also show you what packages are coming that day. But they don't. I think that whatever they do to show that they are done with mail sorting triggers the email, that sometimes happens before they are actually done with mail sort, but before they ever even start the package sort. The email I get almost never shows any packages being delivered that day. You pretty much have to login to the site to see what is being delivered that day.
I could go on and on and on about all the shit wrong with Informed Delivery. I will try to update this as I remember more things, but it is everything you would expect in
's from a USPS website.This sounds exactly like Polish Post Office. I guess some things are the same everywhere.
I could go into details, but I'm getting fucking angry by just typing 'Polish Post Office'.
-
Complete garbage.
-
@Polygeekery said in USPS Informed Delivery:
Complete garbage.
Oh. They must use Facebook as their backend. That would explain a lot...
-
-
@loopback0 said in USPS Informed Delivery:
At least it's not wrong
Well, not in that case I don't guess.
But, I had a theory that the:
Were due to local mail going through a different sort process and not getting scanned. That doesn't appear to be the case though because I got a piece of mail today that was not scanned in or the image did not show up, from out of state. So I have NFC what causes that. As it is the USPS I guess the most likely cause is operator error.
-
@Polygeekery said in USPS Informed Delivery:
I at first through that perhaps they didn't get scanned, but if they were not scanned then how does it know about them to even display this?
They don't take images of flats, they just process the address label. I'm assuming these were magazines or large envelopes?
Why use the site when they send you an email every day?
-
@JazzyJosh said in USPS Informed Delivery:
Why use the site when they send you an email every day?
I'm going to guess you didn't read the thread?
The missing pieces of mail are not always flats or packages. Frequently they are local pieces of mail. Like checks that people send me, which is primarily why I would use it.
-
@Polygeekery said in USPS Informed Delivery:
I'm going to guess you didn't read the thread?
It is one of the safer assumptions....
-
@Polygeekery said in USPS Informed Delivery:
As it is the USPS I guess the most likely cause is operator error.
For a while, I had all my mail going to a PO Box and I liked Informed Delivery because I could check to see if there was anything important that I needed to go pick up.
One day last summer, it said that I had package coming. The next day, I check the tracking and it shows that the package arrived at my local post office but then was immediately sent back to the city where it originated.
(one of the few times USPS was actually updating tracking info in a fairly timely manner)
The next day, the package was sent back to my local post office and, again, was returned back to the originating city.
This happened every day for a week. Seriously.
I was expecting a package coming from that same city, so finally, I had to go up to the post office when they were open, stand in line for a while, so I could find out WTF was going on with my package.
As it turned out, it wasn't my package. Apparently a pallet of magazines was sent out with my PO Box as the address. The local post office recognized that this was a mistake (it's a somewhat small town and they know me) and sent it back. The other post office gets the magazines back, says "WTF is this?" and promptly ships them out again. Lather rinse repeat.
Eventually, someone from my local post office had to call the other post office and tell them to quit returning the shipment, because it was mis-addressed.
-
Is there any country with a postal system that doesn't suck?
Czech Post is atrocious, half the time they can't be bothered actually delivering parcels so they just shove a slip note into your mailbox claiming you weren't at home and to come pick up the parcel from the post office instead. There is even a joke about that:
Mr. Novák, where were you last Monday between the hours of 9am and 5pm?
I was at home.
Funny, that's not what the Czech Post told us!I also had a great experience once when I was picking up a parcel from abroad that I had to pay duty for. After standing in a queue for 30 minutes I find that they don't accept cards. Those payment terminals? "Oh, those are only for our in-house bank and would you like to open an account with us by the way?" The post office was about to close so I had to sprint to the closest ATM and get cash out.
Incidentally, pushing things that have absolutely nothing to do with postal service is a running theme there: bank accounts, insurance, newspapers... It's obvious the poor people at the counter enjoy pushing those about much as I do but reportedly, unlike mail services, the sales of those 'extra' services count towards their KPIs and if they don't sell enough, they get their pay docked.
I remember reading an anonymous account from an employee who went on to explain an elaborate schweikian scheme they had set up at their local post office to get around this: Each month they would themselves open a bunch of new accounts, pay the account fees (lower than the pay deduction), shuffle a certain amount of money between those accounts (from a fund raised among themselves specifically for this purpose) in order to register the accounts as 'active' towards the KPI, and then close them again.
Australia Post are generally much better but they still suck. Their delivery estimates are woefully inaccurate. Not too long ago I get an email telling me that "[my] delivery is coming today," only to get a second email couple of hours later saying that "[my] delivery is unlikely to come today."
Thankfully the tracking information is pretty detailed so based on whether it shows the parcel scanned in at the local sorting depot in the morning, I can work out whether it will show up that day, regardless of the estimated date.
-
Last month I ordered something on eBay which was shipped via Hermes. They're cheap, and for a reason.
This is the tracking information for that parcel:12:49 - Thu 21 Feb
Your friendly local courier has collected your parcel. We just need to process it and we'll get it on its way to you09:45 - Fri 22 Feb
Your parcel is at our local depot and on its way to you14:33 - Fri 22 Feb
We've got your parcel and we're processing it for you19:05 - Sat 23 Feb
Further updates on your parcel to follow19:06 - Sat 23 Feb
We've received your parcel07:03 - Sun 24 Feb
Your parcel is at our local depot and on its way to you10:32 - Sun 24 Feb
Your parcel is on its way to you today10:44 - Sun 24 Feb
Your friendly local courier will try to deliver between 11:00 and 13:00 today12:16 - Sun 24 Feb
Your parcel has been delivered and signed for by the recipientNear enough 3 days, 2 of which were between the local depot and the local depot.
This is how far away the sender is, according to Google Maps:
-
@loopback0 I once had a package that was to be delivered from within my city. That package took a detour to Washington state, across a continent out of its route.
-
@Polygeekery
My father had once a pair of climbing shoes make a world tour. The French shop send it to my dad in the south of France with La Poste. For some unholy reason La Poste mistook the south of the country for one of it's overseas territories in the pacific happily shipping it there ... and back.
-
@Deadfast said in USPS Informed Delivery:
Is there any country with a postal system that doesn't suck?
Czech Post is atrocious
I've heard that they also have a big scandal in their school systems. Apparently, a lot of teachers have been giving good grades to students who don't deserve them, and now many teachers are being accused of passing bad Czechs.
-
I had a package sent to me from California, that took a couple days to go from one mail depot to another, which was a 40 minute walk away. In fact I posted about it
(probably in the Status thread).Another time, I had ordered a package from China, which took an unexpected detour through Norway.
e: I was totally wrong and way off; it was a day and a half and an hour walk.
-
Another postal service
that the USPS is likely innocent for:Some services like FedEx Smartpost will deliver between cities and then use USPS for last mile delivery. Since I keep an eye on tracking for important packages I have noticed on more than one occasion where FedEx Smartpost has picked an item up in California and turned it over to USPS just miles from where they picked it up and USPS did the rest of the 2,000+ miles. FedEx did nothing that the shipper could not have done themselves, and likely charged a premium to do so.
-
@hungrier said in USPS Informed Delivery:
took a couple days to go from one mail depot to another, which was a 40 minute walk away.
Yes, given how postal systems work that's not too surprising. The local post office only sorts incoming mail, all outgoing mail is just forwarded to the sorting depot as-is.
As a kid I had a part-time job packaging and mailing out appliance spare parts. Anything we recognised as going to an address serviced by the local post office would go on a separate pile specifically to avoid this.
-
@Deadfast said in USPS Informed Delivery:
Is there any country with a postal system that doesn't suck?
I have a strong suspicion the answer is "no".
If you replaced "Czech Post" by "French Post" in your message, it would still be 100% accurate.
Oh, and they like to raise their prices every year because "fewer and fewer people send mail". I'm not very good at economics, but I'm pretty sure supply & demand doesn't work that way.
-
@Deadfast said in USPS Informed Delivery:
As a kid I had a part-time job packaging and mailing out appliance spare parts. Anything we recognised as going to an address serviced by the local post office would go on a separate pile specifically to avoid this.
But what did you do with that pile then? Drive it to the mail sorting center so that it can immediately make its way back to your local post office with a stamp?
-
This post is deleted!
-
@JBert said in USPS Informed Delivery:
@Deadfast said in USPS Informed Delivery:
As a kid I had a part-time job packaging and mailing out appliance spare parts. Anything we recognised as going to an address serviced by the local post office would go on a separate pile specifically to avoid this.
But what did you do with that pile then? Drive it to the mail sorting center so that it can immediately make its way back to your local post office with a stamp?
When the truck from the post office came to pick the parcels up, the driver would load those local ones separately. At the post office they'd deal with them as incoming mail while everything else would be sent off to the depot.
-
@Deadfast said in USPS Informed Delivery:
@hungrier said in USPS Informed Delivery:
took a couple days to go from one mail depot to another, which was a 40 minute walk away.
Yes, given how postal systems work that's not too surprising. The local post office only sorts incoming mail, all outgoing mail is just forwarded to the sorting depot as-is.
As a kid I had a part-time job packaging and mailing out appliance spare parts. Anything we recognised as going to an address serviced by the local post office would go on a separate pile specifically to avoid this.
Over here, mail deposit boxes universally have two slits - one for local mail, and a separate one for non-local mail. Though there was best-effort overnight delivery either way.
-
@PleegWat said in USPS Informed Delivery:
Over here, mail deposit boxes universally have two slits - one for local mail, and a separate one for non-local mail. Though there was best-effort overnight delivery either way.
We used to have that. Either our citizens are too stupid to use it or our postal workers are too dumb/lazy to use them so they went away and were replaced with just one box.
-
No there aren't. Today is Sunday.
This is the kind of stuff that makes me wonder what kind of clusterfuck this whole system is.
-
Gotta say that in this regard the Australian government got something right for a change.
My Wife runs a small business from home, and receives approximately 20 to 30 inbound packages per week (mostly from the US and China), and the mobile app and website offer instant feedback at all scan points. (You can even watch the status change on the app, literally seconds after the delivery driver has scanned the barcode and taken your signature).
With inbound packages from USPS the AusPost app provides detailed information, with push notifications (if you want them), showing the item cleared by US Customs, before the USPS website is even updated beyond "Shipping Label Created, USPS Awaiting Item Pre-Shipment".
Our biggest problems are that delivery drivers are lazy and will assume nobody is home at a residential address to receive parcels midweek. So they end up just putting a card in your mailbox without even ringing the doorbell, then return your item to the LPO for pickup. Admittedly, it's annoying that you lose a day, but it's a LOT better than what you guys have described.
-
@idzy if our postal service were a horse, it would have long ago been turned to glue and dog food.
-
@Polygeekery If you're talking about AusPost. I really do have to disagree. It was partially privatized a while ago, and in so far as their in-house tech goes, it's fairly high quality. I have a few friends who worked there as a stepping-stone job to get some "corporate" experience on their CV, and from what I've heard, they have have a strong Agile focus, and reasonable technical management, plus are well funded as they are a profitable company in their own right, despite being 51% owned by the federal government.
-
@idzy Well now you've gone and awakened a privatization boner the likes of which you may not have been prepared to reckon with
