US Federal Gov't ports their physical mail addresses to something online by mid 2031
US Federal Gov't ports their physical mail addresses to something online by mid 2031
2
1kṀ125
2031
44%
chance

This is a crazy idea but hear me out.

Imagine we want to cut out 90% of the work, delay, and risk of sending physical mail to the government (FOIA requests, IRS forms, queries, etc.)

USGov or some state accepts "mail over internet" where you can directly communicate with a government address via "sending physical mail" via an API which would charge per letter (i.e. internet stamp cost). Note: this market is only about sending TO the government. The unique thing in it is that you don't have to re-regulate everything about the distinction between physical mail and email, and you don't have to track changing personal emails, different reporting requirements. Instead, the gov't could define a limited set of incoming "letters" as also legitimate to send through a certain email address.

The gov't could officially declare: any EMAIL sent to a certain address, in a certain format, would be considered to be a physical letter (even though it would never be printed, inserted into an envelope, scanned, shredded). Sending emails to this endpoint requires strict formatting:

  • address must be a real postal address of a US Federal government

  • there must be a return address field

  • then there are PDFs of the contents.

If this happens within any US Federal government department by june 30 2031, then YES otherwise NO. Note: it doesn't have to be email - it can be some other system. The market is about whether there will be an online way to target physical gov't addresses without law and information going through a more technically sensible change (to actually deprecate physical mail as a concept). It seems easier to just containerize it in some kind of online packet.

I'm not saying this is a good idea.

Related:

Big picture: I'd like to be able to have a permanent, moveable "physical address" where anything sent to it either 1) is scanned and trashed 2) is photographed and saved for me later. That way I could just not worry about mail / moving etc and could also get my info on the road.

This market is only about the sending to the US Gov part.

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23d

Citizens and businesses might be required to register for Drive Mad a secure online mailbox for all official correspondence, similar to how some countries like Denmark and Estonia handle government communications.

28d

This seems to depend heavily on digital signing of email attaining the force of law.

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