USPS Informed Delivery, explained

If you have ever wondered what USPS Informed Delivery actually does, the short version is: it is a free email you can sign up for that previews your household's mail before the carrier even gets to your mailbox. It is one of the more genuinely useful free tools USPS offers, and it is worth five minutes to set up — especially if you are ever on the receiving end of Certified Mail.

What Informed Delivery actually is

Informed Delivery is a free USPS service tied to a specific residential (or eligible business) address. Once you are signed up, USPS sends a daily digest email — typically in the early morning — showing grayscale scanned images of the front of most letter-sized mail scheduled to arrive that day. If you have packages moving through USPS, the same dashboard shows their tracking status as well. It does not tell you what is inside an envelope, and it does not scan every single item that lands in your mailbox — but for the mail that does get automated processing, you get a look at it before the carrier arrives.

How to sign up

You sign up directly with USPS at informeddelivery.usps.com. The process is free and tied to your address, and because the service shows images of mail addressed to you, USPS requires a one-time identity verification step before your account is activated. Beyond that, the exact verification flow can vary, so we won't guess at specifics here — USPS's own sign-up pages walk you through what is required at the time you enroll.

Why it is useful if you are expecting Certified Mail

If someone has sent you Certified Mail — a legal notice, an IRS letter, a lease document — you can normally track it with its 20-digit tracking number at USPS.com. Informed Delivery does not replace that tracking number, but it adds a second, independent signal. Seeing a scanned envelope show up in your morning digest tells you the piece is physically moving through the mail stream that day, often before a tracking page updates to "Out for Delivery." Combined with the actual tracking number, you get a fuller picture of where the letter is and roughly when it will land in your box — which can meaningfully cut down on the uncertainty of watching a tracking number that has not updated yet.

For more on what each Certified Mail tracking scan means and how long delivery typically takes, see our Certified Mail tracking guide.

A note on mail theft

Informed Delivery also has a secondary, honest benefit: it gives you a record of what USPS expected to deliver to your address. If your digest shows a piece of mail that never actually turns up in your mailbox, that mismatch is worth noticing — it is one of the more practical, everyday ways people catch mail theft early, rather than realizing weeks later that something important never arrived. We go into what to do if that happens in our mail theft guide.