LetterAgent
Mail physical letters by just asking your AI assistant.
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No. A regular first-class letter gets no tracking number: once it's in the box, nobody scans it again until delivery. If you need visibility, you have to buy it: certified or registered mail adds tracking. The free alternative is Informed Delivery, which emails you scans of mail arriving that day.
Tracking needs a unique barcode tied to your item, and regular letters don't get one. The barcode sprayed on your envelope at the sorting plant is a routing code derived from the address, not an identity for your letter: thousands of envelopes get functionally identical codes every day. The postal service moves lettermail in bulk, by the tray and the truckload, and scanning each envelope individually would slow the whole system to a crawl. That's the trade-off baked into the price of a stamp: cheap and fast, but invisible.
Informed Delivery is a free USPS service that emails you grayscale images of the mail arriving that day, taken by the same sorting equipment that reads the addresses. It's the closest thing to tracking a regular letter, with one big caveat: it shows mail addressed to you, not mail you sent. It tells the recipient what's coming, not the sender where it is. Sign up if you want the heads-up on incoming mail, but don't expect it to track something you dropped in a mailbox.
| Option | Who sees what | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Regular first-class letter | Nobody sees anything until it arrives | Just postage |
| Informed Delivery | The recipient sees scans of incoming mail each morning | Free from USPS |
| Certified mail (US) | The sender gets tracking scans and a delivery record | Postage plus the certified fee |
| Registered mail (US/Canada) | The sender gets chain-of-custody tracking plus a signature | Postage plus the registered fee |
Pay when the letter's arrival matters more than its cost: deadlines, legal notices, anything where "it got lost in the mail" would be an expensive excuse. For everything else, the stamp's invisibility is fine: the overwhelming majority of regular letters arrive without incident. One middle path people overlook: a certificate of mailing is cheap and proves you sent the letter on a given date, which is all some deadlines actually require. Match the proof to the stakes.
Ask the recipient to confirm receipt, or build confirmation into the letter itself: a line like "please reply to confirm you got this" costs nothing. For business mail, a short follow-up email a few days after the expected arrival closes the loop. None of this is tracking, but a two-line reply is the cheapest delivery confirmation ever invented.
Ready to mail it? Send your letter with LetterAgent: describe it to your AI assistant, approve the exact quoted price, and it's printed and mailed.
LetterAgent is a working name. Prices include print, postage, and our service fee. US prices in USD, Canadian prices in CAD (Canadian prices exclude applicable sales tax, added at checkout). Currently in private testing.
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