USPS Informed Delivery: What You Should Know Informed Delivery lets anyone sign up online to view scans of the exterior of incoming letter mail — the sender's return address and your name and address as printed on the envelope — tied to a specific residential address. To sign up, USPS requires identity verification, but the fastest and most commonly used method relies on phone number entry plus knowledge-based questions pulled from credit and public-record data (past addresses, loan details, etc.). Because this type of personal information is widely available through data breaches, someone who has enough of your PII can pass this verification step and create an account linked to your address — without your knowledge and without needing physical access to your mailbox. Once that account exists, they can see who is sending you mail and how often, which can reveal sensitive relationships (banks, medical providers, attorneys, new addresses) even though it doesn't expose mail contents or packages. How to protect yourself: - Claim your own address first, using the mail-based verification code (not the phone/KBA option) — this requires physical access to your mailbox, closing the weaker path. - If you don't want the feature active at all, email
[email protected] or contact the U.S. Postal Inspection Service to request your address be blocked from Informed Delivery.