I'm looking for a solution to a problem for folks who like to travel for more than about 2 weeks. It would combine USPS Informed Delivery with snailmail scan-and-email services.

For those who are not familiar with USPS Informed Delivery, it is a free service where the USPS emails every morning an image of (almost) all normal-size envelopes and cards that you will receive later that day. This is a great service for when you are traveling...you can see the envelopes of bills that come in and pay the bills online.

There are also services that will open and scan all your mail while you are traveling, emailing you the scans. Before you leave town, you tell the post office to forward all your mail to the company. A downside of this is that a person at the forwarding company can peruse all your mail.

I'm envisioning a service that would receive your forwarded mail while you are traveling, and open-and-scan only those particular envelopes that you request. You would know which envelopes to request because you saw them in Informed Delivery emails from the USPS.

Is there such a service?

Many offices are doing this during the pandemic. With almost everyone working remotely, the skeleton staff in the mailroom emails a scan of incoming express and first class mail covers and one can either have the item opened & scanned or simply held for whenever (or tossed).

That works well in a business setting, but I am not sure that it is economically feasible to do this as a paid service. E.g., not sure most would pay the cost of the second step rather than simply having everything opened and scanned.

Will "Informed delivery" even work together with mail forwarding, i.e. would you know which envelopes are forwarded?
But just a short google search and the first result seem to have what you want - https://www.postscanmail.com/how-it-works.html

Excellent! That is just what I was looking for. Thank you Ditto.

I've been away for the last two months and did just this.

- I had informed delivery at my home address and have had it for a few years now. It's great
- I have a mailbox at VirtualPostMail in LA https://my.virtualpostmail.com
- I set up a temp forwarding order for the two months to send mail from the house to VPM.

I would get the usual notifications each morning about what would be coming to my home address. A day or two later, they would show up at VPM after being forwarded, and I could get it scanned, shipped, or trashed. Pretty flawless.

Is that what you are trying to achieve?

Thanks for the reply DMSFCA, that is what I was looking for.