Informed Delivery® Mobile

Review by eFreeware

Most mail arrives without warning. You walk to the mailbox or the front door and find out what is there when you get to it, which is fine until the day you are waiting on something specific and have no way to tell whether it is coming today or next week. Short of checking constantly, there is not much you can do about that.

Informed Delivery Mobile is the United States Postal Service's own app for exactly this gap. It is free, sits in the Business category, and is built around a simple idea: give you a look at your mail before it reaches you, along with tracking updates for the packages heading your way. It has been downloaded more than 500,000 times and holds a 4.8 average from 17,209 ratings, which suggests a lot of people find the basic premise useful enough to keep.

A preview of the mail before it lands

The core of the app is the daily digest. Once you are set up, it sends notifications that preview the mail and packages scheduled to arrive soon, so the first thing you see in the morning can be a rundown of what is on its way rather than a blank guess. That is the feature everything else hangs off, and it is the reason most people would install this.

The preview itself comes as grayscale images of your mail. These are images of the exterior, address side only, of letter-sized pieces, so you are seeing the envelope rather than the contents. That is enough to recognize a bill, a card, a government letter or a piece of marketing, which is usually all you need to decide whether a trip to the mailbox can wait.

There is a limit worth understanding before you rely on it. Images are only provided for letter-sized mailpieces that pass through the Postal Service's automated equipment, so larger envelopes, magazines and parcels do not appear in the same way. Delivery can lag behind the notification, so the developer suggests allowing a few days. Treat the digest as an early heads-up rather than a promise about today.

Tracking that runs both directions

Alongside the mail preview, the app handles package tracking. You can scan eligible tracking numbers or label barcodes to follow the status of packages, and it covers both inbound and outbound shipments, so it works as well for something you are sending as for something you are expecting. Scanning a label is quicker than typing a long number by hand, and it keeps the details in one place rather than scattered across emails and slips of paper.

Delivery status updates arrive directly on your phone, which means you do not have to keep reopening a browser tab to check on progress. For anyone who sends parcels regularly, having outbound tracking in the same app as incoming mail is a sensible arrangement, since both sides of the same errand live together.

The app has been updated since its September 11, 2025 release, with the most recent changes adding support for mail delivery notifications alongside bug fixes and enhancements. That addition fits the app's purpose neatly: the more precisely it can tell you when something has actually arrived, the less often you need to check the mailbox on a hunch.

Mailer content and account setup

There is a second layer to the mail images that is easy to overlook. Where a mailer has provided it, the app lets you interact with digital content tied to your mail, such as special offers and related links. Instead of a paper coupon sitting in an envelope, the relevant offer can be opened from the notification itself. It is a small feature, but it turns some of the mail you would otherwise skim and discard into something you can act on immediately.

Getting started means creating an account or signing in with one you already have, so there is a registration step before any of this works. That is normal for a service tied to your specific address and mail stream, and it is the kind of setup you do once and then forget about. After that, the app's job is to keep you informed without requiring much input.

What it asks of you, and what it will not do

The trade-offs here are mostly about scope rather than cost. The app is free, carries no ads and offers no in-app purchases, so there is nothing to buy and nothing interrupting the experience. What you get instead is a tool with a deliberately narrow job: preview letter mail and track packages. It is not a general-purpose mailbox for your correspondence, and the images stop at the outside of the envelope.

The dependence on automated processing is the part I would keep in mind. If your mail is mostly catalogs, large envelopes and parcels, the preview side of the app will have less to show you, and the tracking side will carry more of the weight. The delivery timing caveat matters too: a notification is not a guarantee of same-day arrival, and the developer explicitly asks for several days of leeway. Anyone expecting a precise countdown to the mailbox will be working against how the service describes itself.

None of this is a flaw so much as the shape of the thing. The app reports what the Postal Service's equipment has seen and what tracking scans show, and it is honest about the gap between that and the moment a piece of mail reaches your door.

Best suited to regular letter mail

The people who will get the most from this are those who receive a steady flow of letter-sized mail and want advance notice of it. If you run a small business, handle household bills and correspondence, or simply like knowing whether the day's mail is worth collecting, the daily digest does real work. It is also a natural fit for anyone who sends and receives packages often enough that keeping tracking in one app is easier than chasing numbers around.

It is less compelling if your mailbox is mostly parcels and oversized mail, since the image previews are built around letter-sized pieces. That is not a reason to avoid the app, but it does mean the mail-preview feature will feel thinner for some users than for others, and the package tracking will be doing most of the useful work.

For a free utility tied to something as routine as the mail, that is a reasonable signal that the basics are being handled.

A free window into what is coming

Informed Delivery Mobile does one thing and does it without asking anything of your wallet. It shows you grayscale images of incoming letter mail, tracks packages in both directions, and pushes delivery updates to your phone, all under an account you set up once. The limits are stated plainly by the developer: letter-sized mail on automated equipment only, and delivery that can lag the notification by several days.

If you want a preview of your mail and a single place to follow USPS packages, this is a straightforward install.

What's new in version 1.2.0

- Added support for Mail Delivery Notifications - Various bug fixes and enhancements