I’ve had it for a long time now. Things it helps me with:

When I’m on vacation and have a mail hold, I still know what mail cane each day. If I see a bill I know to log in and pay the bill.

I know if I have an important letter and whether it’s worth rushing to empty the box for the day.

A few times I knew to go ask the neighbors if they had my mail because I saw a letter was supposed to come but didn’t.

Also it tells you about packages that are coming that day so you can make sure you get them and that they weren’t stolen by a porch pirate.

>Big waste of money in my opinion.

Mail is scanned and archived anyway, and has been for years. This service merely let's you see the images they already have on hand. It costs not very much extra to add a customer side to an already existing system.

It's useful for people whose mailbox is down the street and it's useful to know if your mail is getting misdirected.

They already have the mail images from their sorting machines, so it doesn't cost them much to email the images to you.

I signed up for it after my letter carrier misdelivered two pieces of my mail in less than two weeks after having maybe one mistake in the previous decade. I think my post office stopped using the same carrier on the same route everyday and instead tried some sort of "load-balancing" scheme where a carrier's route can change based on mail volumes.

By seeing the mail I should be receiving, I know to talk to m neighbors if it doesn't show up in my box within the next day or two. We continue to have delivery issues about every couple of months.

I think this is intended to improve reliability. Having an image taken at some point in the process can identify issues pre and post sort. Maybe even provide evidence that mail was postmarked at a specific time.

It solves the problem of wasted energy delivering mail people don't want, like junk mail/spam. I'd be very interested to see how much wasted paper and gas goes into producing and delivering junk mail. Mail processing centers already use computer vision to see where a parcel's going instead of manually sorting, so this is a logical step forward.

>It solves the problem of wasted energy delivering mail people don't want, like junk mail/spam.

Even if that was true, which it isn't as far as I can tell, that would be counter to the USPS's goals. They make a lot of their money delivering junk mail.

How does this stop junk mail ?

I have this and get an email every day showing me a bunch of mail I don’t want or need.

My mistake. I thought the point was to let you choose to discard mail before receiving it.

That would be awesome, but it’s just a dark foreshadowing of the junk to come.

I think it's helpful for PO boxes or when the mailbox is far from the house.