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I'd been wanting something like this as I have a few physical mailboxes but rarely need the physical mail itself. Do you have any useful links to the 1583-based providers?



I used to work for one of the Commercial Mail Receiving Agencies (CMRA) as defined by the Form 1583. Here's a non-comprehensive list:

myus.com, earthclassmail.com, usglobalmail.com, bongous.com, usamail1.com, maillinkplus.com, usa2me.com, usabox.com, reship.com and probably 50 or so other.

The google keywords you want to search with are "mail forwarding" or "international mail forwarding" or "virtual mailbox" to get started. Not all of them offer pictures of the mail or scanning, but some of them definitely do.

It's a REALLY fractured industry because there's essentially zero M&A activity. The Form 1583 is a giant pain to fill out and it ties you to a specific both company and address. Furthermore if you decide to switch from one to another you can't take advantage of the USPS' normal "fill out this form to get your mail forwarded" feature because as far as the USPS is concerned that's the CMRA's problem, not theirs.

In fairness to the USPS it's a really tough task to determine not only what address mail is going to but what person's name (and box/suite/apt/whatever number) it's going to at that address. Then once you figure that out, you have to figure out if that's one of the probably 500 people who are on the "forward" list at any given time. I know because I built a system to that and more for the company I worked at and it wasn't foolproof. So if it can't be automated easily the only alternative is to have the postal worker on the route do it. Where I worked we got many thousands of letters a day, it would have taken our mailman/woman half a day or longer to go through everything trying to match recipients up against the list of 500 people who want forwarding.


I've been a happy earthclassmail customer for years; a few other mom and pop forwarding services since 1998.




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