Fixing USPS Informed Delivery

How I Replaced USPS Informed Delivery With a Cleaner Email Digest

So I read this article and I just thought, why not try it out myself?

I like Informed Delivery because it emails on days when I receive new mail, so that I don’t have to go downstairs every day. But over time, the emails got cluttered, and I stopped liking opening them.

This configuration solves that problem for me by making Informed Delivery emails useful again. This is the perfect single-person application I can deploy and just use forever.

There’s a different configuration in the article that I wouldn’t choose for myself. I don’t like how it uses Python with SES, S3, and Lambda—four pieces of infrastructure I don't care to maintain. I would use TypeScript, deploy to Vercel (I have an account there), and since I am using FastMail…

Actually, I knew nothing about FastMail and started there with AI to write a small app that would get triggered on new mail, read it, place a revised email in my inbox, and remove the original email. I didn’t know FastMail uses JMAP, but it turns out JMAP has built-in web notification capability. Just like the Gmail API, it fires a webhook on new mail, but you do need to refresh the webhook subscription from time to time (once a day is a good default).

Well, I got that going within a few minutes and it worked. Then I asked AI to do the same thing as described in this blog post but to work with my configuration (TypeScript, Vercel, JMAP). One hour later it was deployed and tested. And even provided a pnpm setup command to automatically subscribe to JMAP webhooks.

I didn’t waste any brain power and configured my Informed Delivery emails the way I want them to be. By the way, the source code is here if you want to use it. If you have a different stack, just tell your LLM to implement the same as described in the original blog post using your preferred stack. In this age of personal developer setups, don’t tie yourself to an architecture you don't care to maintain.

Enjoy.