As noted earlier, the USPS is a struggle bus that stops at no good locations. But here's an idea for transforming Informed Delivery into something useful. Something others could and some do.
This estate is gonna be the death of me yet. I swear. Finally got the Final Report in. How do I know? Well, UPS reliably delivers and offers tracking. Then, as they should, the Probate Court cashed the check. That's right, every move you make, there's a check they take. Not that that necessarily means anything, at least not for certain. Now here is one thing the Probate Court does really, really well: they answer the phone. And you can talk to a real live person who, given the proper info, can tell you the current status of the estate. I know folks just love to bitch about government incompetence but they better not be dissin' DeKalb Probate.
Now it was time to get this done and dusted, so I filed the petition to close the estate. Much like the final report it was: complete the petition; get supporting docs; write a check; and deliver via UPS. UPS got it there overnight with confirmation of delivery. Probate cashed the check 5-7 business days later. Then. Nothing. Not for another week. Not for another two weeks. Then three. Before it was an entire month I call. Same experience as before. Come to find out the judge had signed off on the petition and it had mailed out the same day. USPS. I'm subscribed to "Informed Delivery" and though it has been over two weeks there has been no delivery and no information.
So I got to thinking if I've signed up to be informed why do they restrict it to delivery? Keep in mind, what they show in that email is only loosely related to what they put in my mailbox and they have never informed me that a neighbors mail would wind up in my box though it happens all the time. What seems reasonable is that the USPS could inform me when they get any mail, except maybe "resident" junk mail, that is addressed to me. As soon as they stamp that postmark an email should be headed my way. After all they have my physical address and my email address. That way I would know that the Probate Court had sent something my way.
You might argue that would expose the incredibly long time local mail takes to go across town, but we already know that from the postmark, which is timestamped, and the time we pull it out of the mailbox. There may be some concern that notification of mail entering the system that somehow never exits the system. Lost mail, never found, but now we'd know. Heaven forbid.
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