maildrops

A new opportunity that I just ran across at PPP is for a maildrop directory. Initially, you are probably wondering the same thing I was - what exactly is a maildrop? Apparently, it is a place where individuals or businesses can rent mailboxes for shipping and receiving mail, or for remailing it.

The advantages to this method are, of course, increased anonymity and sometimes the ability to hide your identity. The site is basically a collection of maildrop businesses world-wide, compiled into one website. It's not too much to look at, and you get the feeling that this guy basically copied yellow page listings for maildrops into one place and is now charging businesses $40 to "update" their listing. On the bright side, if you were looking for a local business offering this service and didn't feel like searching your local phonebook, you could pop onto this website to find one fairly quickly, as they are listed by country, state and city.

Their help page provides some basic information on how these services work, and who might benefit from using them. It also provides a slight rant about the government's current mail snooping technology that was probably enabled by the Patriot Act. However, seeing as this is a directory listing service, I don't understand why they make statements such as "We offer overnight delivery and express services. When you mail us a parcel, we immediately take care of it per your instructions." So who is "we"? Does this site offer its own remailing services, too?

One of the biggest advantages of these services is that, according to this site, they don't require any ID. Compare this with your typical post office that requires stringent ID verification methods, and it makes these maildrop services the perfect tool for spamming, scamming, phishing, conning, and pretending that you are someone/somewhere that you aren't. According to the site, "Mail drops will receive a letter from you, open the outer envelope and remail the enclosed letter from their location. This gives the impression that you are writing from that location." Although they also make the statement that, "Mail drops are completely independent from the government and this ensures absolute privacy", I have a feeling that the goverment could still trace that mail if they wanted to. Once again, another fun side effect of the Patriot Act.

In a nutshell, these services offer individuals and businesses the opportunity to try and hide their true identity from other individuals and businesses via "trojan horse" mailing techniques. Are they impervious to government snooping tactics? Doubtful. Since they are still utilizing government postal carriers, I suspect that they are still subject to the same scrutiny as anyone with a P.O. Box. Granted, it may take a bit of threatening behavior from the government before one of these maildrop services gives up someone's name or credit card number, but at this point with our compromised privacy, I don't think that anything going through the mail is untraceable.