[Snipped letterhead]
November 15, 2020
The Honorable Lisa Murkowski
United States Senator
800 Glacier Avenue Suite 101
Juneau, Alaska 99801
Via Fax: 877-857-0322 (Fax failed 3 times)
Dear Senator Murkowski:
The USPS has quite a nice service called 'Informed Delivery'. This sends an email of the outside of first class mail before delivery. In an era of theft, if you're expecting a package or delivery of controlled documents like checks, it's priceless.
But they've just made a bizarre change, without notice, in how they email the information. Until people notice, their messages may land in spam. I just wanted to bring this to your attention.
Since 2019-05-01, when I signed up, I've received 332 notifications from:
USPSInformedDelivery@USPS.gov. A 29 character email. Highly credible. Six million, three hundred fifty thousand (6,350,000) Google hits. A 'gov' domain. Unquestionably legitimate email.
On 2020-11-14, without warning, the messages are now emailed from:
USPSInformedDelivery@InformedDelivery.USPS.com. A 46 character email. Dubious. Nearly impossible to type correctly. Only 47,000 Google hits. A 'com' domain, significantly less credible.
I don't want to be unreasonably critical, but I just can't miss this chance to complain. What was the purpose of this change? What can they be thinking? It's like monkeys typing out the works of Shakespeare. Of course, it is the government. The post office is about as private as the federal reserve.
It just seems to me that in an era of spam, not having an address you can realistically type into your whitelist, and not even bothering to tell people you're going to change the address, is negligent.
I like the postal service. They deliver for less. They are faster. They are reliable. They are highly profitable, but for the retirement prefunding no other company on the planet has to do. The only thing that's gone wrong in the past 15 years was an unexpected delivery delay that turned out to be because the sender used media mail and it was on the barge.
But this? A change from a 29 to 46 character email address without notice? Somebody needs to get their head examined.
Sign me aggravated, but you really needn't reply. I just hope that in the oversight of the agency, someone might question this ridiculous change. That's all. Thank you.
Sincerely,
/s/ (postal mail, Nov. 15)
Walter M. Gregg
PO Box 21693
Juneau, Alaska 99802