A Better Way for Forwarding Mail (TFN)
Theoretical Future News is a work of fiction
Jan 1, 2022
My Phrase My Address
The USPS has announced its latest initiative to maintain its relevance in the 21st century. The service has been named My Phrase My Address (MPMA) and its goal is to make getting your mail even easier. Customers who sign up for AMP will be able to choose short phrases that will be associated with them. Once they have selected their phrase they can share it with friends and family that can be used to either replace their existing mailing address or to help with forwarding.
“Our goal is to help give customers the peace of mind that when they send something to family the package that the family member will get it. Unlike mail forwarding’s cap of 12 months and need for processing, MPMA will allow for customers to receive mail at their new address within 48 hours of updating. Sending mail to an MPMA user is a little different, customers will need to include the recipients My Phrase below the recipient’s name, other than that its like sending regular mail.” Postmaster General Megan Bernan*
Response to the USPS’s announcement has been positive, with several commenters on Twitter noting how many wedding invitations and thank you notes that could have avoided “return to sender”
Privacy advocates have expressed concerns that MPMA would allow stalkers to continue to harass their victims. When we asked the USPS for clarification on how MPMA users would be protected from potential harassment we received an exert from the MPMA support page.
“Users who no longer desire to receive mail associated with a given My Phrase have the option of either temporarily or permanently deactivating the selected My Phrase. Users should be aware that any My Phrase that has been inactive for more than 2 years may be returned to circulation.”
*Postmaster Bernan did clarify that while MPMA is intended to allow for mail to easily follow recipients around the country the USPS will only guarantee the delivery date estimated for the MPMA address that was active at the time of sending.
Back to the present
The reason I came up with this post was inspired by several occasions where my wife and I didn’t receive mail as it was addressed to our old address, which we haven’t lived at for more than a year. I believe the technology is semi-reasonable. The core concept is that people who would sign up for a service like MPMA would then get to create a profile that would have their current address and a history of all of their previous addresses, then they would choose a phrase for sending mail to them. So for me, I might have Obadiah Kopchak “boozy waterbottle” and from now on whenever a family member wants to send me mail, if they write it to include the phrase “boozy waterbottle” the USPS will send that item to whatever address I have as active for my profile. Ideally I’d like to see people have the options of having several phrases associated with them allowing recipients to differentiate which packages should go to other addresses, an example would be medication refills, those I want to follow me where ever I am, but something like old year books, I think my permanent address would make sense. Ideally every person who wanted one would get at least one public “My Phrase” to help services like FedEx or UPS get packages to recipients even if your college buddy has your address from 3 years ago.
There are several design questions.
How will the My Phrase actually work, are we saying that I can send a package with just a phrase? Personally I think this would only make sense for large corporate clients who could pay for the privilege of just a phrase. That way if I need to return an item to an online retailer I have the option of just using that retailer’s custom phrase. Or sending taxes into the IRS could be addressed simply as “Taxes due April 15”.
Generally I think the way the phrase would work best would be Name+ My Phrase, that way the same phrase can be used by multiple users who find significance in that phrase.
How does this get paid for? Hard to answer definitively, one source would be corporate andgovernemnt clients lease a phrase. Another revenue stream would be custom phrase selections, where users get a certain number of phrases to choose from for free, and a set number of active phrases they can use, but if they want to choose their phrase they could pay for one. In theory the business model of What Three Words could be emulated (they have turned the entire planet into a massive grid of addresses that are described using 3 words).
How do customers interact with My Phrase My Address? If this idea was exclusively for private industry I feel it could be done on an app and a website and you could call it a day, to implement MPMA for the USPS there would need to be some low tech alternatives, where customers who wanted to could fill out a form similar to a change of address form that would provide them with their My Phrase, once they had their My Phrase, forms very similar to the current change of address form could be used.
I hope this blog post was interesting, again I think the technology is viable, it’s more of a revenue/demand question. My issues with mail being sent to bad addresses might not be a consistent enough issue to warrant trying to overhaul a rather large entity like the USPS. There is also the question as to how much this would complicate logistics, to that I have no answer.
Questions comments are welcome.