My Dad used to have one (around the divorce of my mom), My Uncle had one, as he was abroad a lot and moved house a couple of times, and wanted a dutch address. etc etc.

As for paper email, aren't there also services that open and scan your mail for you?

Not exactly "DNS for physical mail" as you described but quite handy!

As for the obfuscation part, if the delivery people know how to resolve... so will many others. ;)

Mail addressed to the PO Box -> You collect from post office

Mail addressed to the PO Box -> They deliver to street address (which only they know)

Mail addressed to street address -> You collect from post office

The most annoying thing I found was that they would only let you have a PO Box in a town if you had a street address there, which I did not.

On the other hand, the PO Box is provided by Royal Mail. Another delivery company (there are many who handle parcels, RM only deliver letters and small packages) would not necessarily have access to it, and certainly not the associated address.

A 302 is like a letter that's been marked return to sender with a forwarding address. The original sender would then know the actual physical address.

First your mail is routed to the provider’s local address or central warehouse, then they manually forward it to you. Some providers (incl the popular Earth Class Mail) operate as a hub-and-spoke network: all mail goes to their centralised distribution center, they process it and send it to you. This means if I buy something from a few blocks away, it will first have to Midwest then back to me.

I’m okay with latency and eventual consistency. I just need an analog->digital funnel for paper mail when I’m thousands of miles from home.

The main discovery was how much of the "virtual address" industry is a nice wrapper around two independent service providers I call "processors" and "sellers".

"Processors" are the people who actually handle your mail. Often they are existing businesses like serviced offices, co-working places, pack&ship outlets etc. These small businesses have a fixed address and personnel, so their marginal cost of handling envelopes is much lower than having to sustain an office dedicated to processing mail. These processors are combined into a whitelisted network and this is how you get many addresses everywhere.

"Sellers" are the endless firms that sell access to networks of processors at arbitrary prices. There are exceptions (e.g. EarthClassMail) who manage their own processing, but most companies I found on the internet are just billing fronts with an app. I found this out because I kept seeing the same "virtual addresses" all the time, so I inspected those buildings on Google Maps or in person.

My selection criteria had three parts: 1. Deliverability (can I send both letters and packages, and will they arrive?) 2. Longevity (will this address exist tomorrow?) and 3. Security (who might be looking through my documents?). Based on this criteria, I have almost no regard for who the "seller" is, and it's all entirely about the "processor". By reviewing addresses given, I found out that sometimes the "virtual address" belongs to a shipping/mailing outlet. These people are dedicated to mail, and tend to be very stable - I prefer them over services offices/co-working places that have other priorities. I also found some mailing stores that were actually UPS stores, and I see this as reducing the risk further.

So for ~$30/mo, all my snail mail goes to a UPS store (managed by the seller service at https://www.anytimemailbox.com). When new item arrives, UPS people send a photo of the outside and I decide whether to trash or forward the item (or pick it up myself). This address looks like a regular apartment number (e.g. "123 Main St #45") and I can use it everywhere (unlike a PO box). In fact, it is listed as my primary address with the phone company, the bank, state driving license, insurance company, government records, and all business registrations. I try to be paperless, but now I am free to travel or move as much as I want knowing I'll never miss anything important from the old school of correspondence.

You can change your virtual address itself or keep the same one for however long you like, and just change the final destination that it resolves to. The postal service knows where your current postal destination is set and third party freight carriers able to look it up from an API (someone has to deliver it eventually after all). Your destination can be changed in your online account, and if you want a particular package delivered somewhere different you can quickly create a new virtual address and use that instead.

How so? Or rather, what exactly do you mean here? Burglars don't want to find you personally. They're scoping out a property an determining if no one is home. They aren't looking though the yellow pages for potential victims remotely; they're driving around the neighborhood trying to get physical access.

Put another way... If I'm the type of person whom criminals will target by name, address obfuscation isn't what I need. Instead, I need a comprehensive security system (likely including body guards). Think heads of state and other famous people.

Joe Developer isn't being targeted by name. He just gets unlucky because he left his MacBook within sight of the window and didn't lock the back door.

  1. Searching through travelogues
  2. Waiting for one where a person is actively posting
  3. Assume that the blogger is still traveling
  4. Researching where that person lives
  5. Hoping they happen to be close by
  6. Hoping no one else lives there/is house sitting/is renting while you're out

1. Driving around looking for a place with a bunch of mail overflowing from the mail box and packages piled on the doorstep or some high value target visible through a window, regardless of knowing what the address is of the house

The good news is you're worried about nothing. However, adding a layer of abstraction to an address won't help curb burglaries.

The scenario where his blog could get him burgled is not burglars who set out to identify targets by reading travelogues. It is a burglar who happens to read the blog because he finds it interesting and happens to recognize that he is being presented with a burglary opportunity.

I think the reader feels like it matters but it doesn't. If someone is "writing from $place" it seems more immediate, more authentic, more real? When really it wouldn't matter for most situations.

This part is done by mailbox companies like EarthClassMail.com. I've used them for years, and it's wonderfully convenient to have the same postal address despite moving all over the country. Plus, if you want, they'll open specific envelopes, deposit checks for you, scan stuff, etc. I love that because as a traveling consultant, I don't wanna wait until I get home to have checks go into my bank account.

Drawbacks: there's a latency and an expense involved with forwarding packages. I tend to not use it for packages, just for regular postal mail. Anytime someone asks for an address, they get my EarthClassMail one, because I probably don't want whatever they're mailing me anyway.

With enough capital it would be fairly straightforward to provide a forwarding service for this. You could also have spam filters or reject mail from specific senders, provide scans of the outside of the letters, specific delivery dates etc.

Given how we are ordering more and more things online nowadays this could be a very exciting opportunity.

I think those services exist in some countries, but not from postal services themself, so delivery-time is still rather slow.

That's the idea: the redirection would be handled by the carriers, not some third party. In place of the current system of (a) scan address; (b) route package; (c) deliver package the process would be (a) scan recipient ID; (b) translate ID to address; (c) route package; (d) deliver package. The address lookup should be completely automated and introduce no discernable additional latency in the mail delivery. It could even be implemented as a special case of the address normalization step carriers already perform.

In the first place there is not even enough data to know whether the huge investment would be justified.

Or do you have one address for UPS deliveries and a different address for FedEx deliveries? (Substitute local carrier names as appropriate.) While that's more work—and pointlessly complex IMHO—you'd just need to set up one ID per carrier and give the correct ID, as opposed to the carrier-specific address.

Anyway, a shortcut to implementing indirection for these less-organized postal services you're describing would be to look up the recipient's ID when the parcel first enters the system and affix a label with the full address. That way the sender doesn't need to know the address and everything else about the delivery can stay the same.

In that scale, nothing is simple, because everything can become expensive on the high run.

Only if you don't consider flexibility part of the task, which is rather short-sighted in today's world. Maybe postal services could afford to be inflexible once, but those days are long past.

Someone has access to this database. And they're selling the data for a price inversely proportional to the exclusivity of their access. Increasingly it seems that if someone is selling data on the open market, this information is increasingly available to bad actors such as burglars.

So it just seems like a very bad form of security by obfuscation. There are definitely things to be said about generally decoupling your physical location from your mailing address if you frequently move, however.

Yes, but that's still an improvement over the status quo where anyone can trivially find my home address with a Google search.

I wonder if there would be a market for the service you're describing today. It seems you could achieve it in the current postal system. You sign up and are assigned a unique identifier, which you use as your "Name", then ship to a local address maintained by that service, who then forward it on.

All you're doing in this case is just centralizing the trust from each individual online business to the reshipping service. Is that a reasonable first step?

Sounds good to me.

You know who is well positioned to do this? Netflix.

I'd imagine it being some kind of non-profit organization that is funded by a combination of donations + fees for the reshipping service.

Put differently, if we want to centralize all this sensitive information (people's residential address), would you want an organization beholden to shareholders and profit margins operating it?

Better them than Amazon, Google or FB. (Oh, the horror!)

But I like the non-profit idea better.

There are also companies that will do this for you with variations on the service (a registered agent is one example, the company Mailboxes Etc also offers this service), which some are dismissing based on "yeah but then a third party is handling your mail". But if your country's post office won't do it then the only alternative is to have a third party handling your mail.

This service exists, and people are dismissing the idea because it is not novel.

I'm not saying your dream is bad, which is why I didn't respond directly to you. What I'm saying is I don't think it's a novel/interesting idea for a startup to work on as I believe was being implied by the person I replied to. Even if it became a big business (which I doubt since even UPS/Fedex/Mailbox ETC don't have that many postal customers for their own services) it's just too easy for the national postal service to compete with if it was successful.

I think it is a great idea for the postal service to do, but it would be very risky for a startup to do, even by modern startup standards. The existing postal system is a marvel of efficiency already.

Yes, but that's a big difference.

> I don't think it's a novel/interesting idea for a startup to work on

I ever said that, and neither did whiddershins. Not all novel ideas are good ideas for startups.

The internet itself was a very bad idea for a startup when it started out (much too capital intensive). That's why it was done by the government and not by a startup.

It does open up some interesting use cases. E.g., when I go on vacation then hold off delivery, if it's from Amazon then deliver it to such and such a post box etc. I'm not sure about the market size though.

Now in the UK large party donors are publicly listed. And parties have memberships in private.

I guess I should do some research!

Some states only allow you to vote in the primary for your affiliated party, others let you pick one or the other regardless, some will only let you vote in one parties if you are affiliated but the other has no such restriction. The system is a giant clusterfuck of rules, but everyone just kind of works with it for now.

Your affiliation is part of your voter registration, so it’s held by your Secretary of State’s office.

For the past 10 months I've been travelling constantly staying at hotels, AirBnb's etc and in a lot of cases not having the permanent physical address is very inconvenient. I've tried multiple solutions but none of them work well. Yes, there are companies that offer "virtual mailboxes", but I can't ship any packages to them.

There's no need to remove addresses from places that already have them, and a system like [Plus codes](https://plus.codes/) could identify physical locations without an address.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geo_URI_scheme

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_softwar...