My Mailbox FAQ
General
My Mailbox notifies you of mail headed to your registered address or community mailbox. This includes both letters and promotional mail, with packages to come in a future release. By downloading the My Mailbox app, you can choose to view your incoming mail through the app, in daily email updates, or both.
With this convenient service, get a sneak peek at your mail before it arrives. Use the My Mailbox app for a summary of both your incoming mail and your recent mail over the last seven days. Choose to get timely updates through the app, to your inbox, or both. With these updates, you can more easily plan your trip to the mailbox, knowing what you’ll find.
Please note that the beta release currently does not support notifications for parcels and non-machinable mail such as unaddressed mail.
Once you have successfully registered to My Mailbox beta, you will receive updates on the mail arriving to your mail box. These updates are available through a daily email and/or the app. You will see:
- The number of mail pieces arriving;
- The name(s) and logo(s) of the mail sender(s) when available;
- A feedback option to provide feedback on the beta or flag any issues
Both email and phone notifications are sent every weekday, typically before 10 am local time. Notifications are not sent on weekends and statutory holidays when mail is not being processed and delivered to the home.
My Mailbox is completely free for all Canadians with an eligible address.
At this time, only select mailing addresses are eligible. Your eligibility depends on various factors, including the mail processing plant associated with your address. If the plant that sorts your mail uses automated sorting equipment, you may be eligible to participate. Plants that sort mail manually cannot currently provide the necessary data for My Mailbox. If your address is not eligible, you’ll be added to a waitlist and contacted once the service is available.
If your home is an eligible address, the only remaining requirement will be to verify you reside at that address. In order to do so, we’ll ask you to answer a few questions to verify you are the resident of that home.
My Mailbox is a consumer service. Business accounts cannot participate in the service at this time.
Through My Mailbox, we’ll update you about incoming mail from the types of organizations and businesses that send account updates, statements, bills, cheques and contracts. We’ll also notify you of mail containing promotions and special offers.
Certain types of mail are not part of this beta, but are planned for a future release, including packages, magazines, catalogues, and oversized mail (with dimensions exceeding 245 mm x 156 mm x 5 mm). We also won’t be able to notify you of personal mail, like a post card from a friend.
My Mailbox informs you of mail en route to your address, which includes mail addressed to yourself or anyone else. If you receive a mail piece for someone who does not live at your address, it’s likely the mail sender needs to update their mailing list. The best way to reduce notifications for a recipient who doesn’t live at your address is by helping the mailer update their mailing address. You can do so by writing “no one with this name at this address” on the mail piece and putting it back in the mailbox.
We send a notification card with a PIN to every household where the service has been enabled. If you are not the person who activated the service, someone else in your household may have. If you do not want the service to be active for your household, you can reach out to mail_courrier@canadapost.ca with your address and the PIN on the card and we will deactivate the service to your household. The service will therefore no longer be available for all members of the household.
If you’ve lost the notice card with the PIN, you can email mail_courrier@canadapost.ca with your home address and we will mail you a new one.
As part of the beta, based on early testing we launched with a seven-day history. We will be evaluating and listening to our users to see if we should increase the history time. Make sure to send us your feedback via the mobile app or daily alert email to make your voice heard!
“Out for delivery” means that your mail item has been scanned at one of our processing plants and will arrive within 1 to 2 business days. Please note that, at this time, we infer the date of delivery based on the last scan in our processing plants. Unfortunately, these are not 100% accurate and there may be some discrepancies. We encourage you to let us know of any of these issues.
”In transit” means that your mail item is arriving soon, but may take several days. Items which are “In transit” must be manually sorted at one of our processing plants and specific delivery information is not yet available.
Sign-up to My Mailbox
You can sign up for the beta from the My Mailbox page, which includes buttons to download. The download buttons will take you to the app store to download the TestFlight app. Open TestFlight and it will show you the My Mailbox beta app, ready for download. Without TestFlight, you won’t be able to download My Mailbox.
You cannot have both apps on the same device. If you already have the Canada Post app on your device and you download the My Mailbox beta app, it will replace the existing Canada Post app.
Yes, any user that meets the participation criteria can sign up for the service. There is no limit of participants from a single household. All members of a household will see the same content.
Yes, My Mailbox will show you all the mail pieces to your household, regardless of the recipient. No information about the inside of the mail piece is revealed – the updates only include the sender and the number of mail pieces. In other words, the information shared between household members is comparable to fetching the mail from a shared physical mailbox.
At this time, the service captures all mail heading to your household, regardless of who it’s addressed to.
That’s great! If you already have a Canada Post account, you can sign in with your username and password and proceed with subscribing to the My Mailbox service.
Activation time for the service may vary, but typically you will begin to receive notifications and have access to your content within two business days after you subscribe.
Privacy
The service will only show the number of mail pieces and who it is from, when available. My Mailbox does not show what is inside of the envelope.
Currently, we cannot limit who can see incoming mail by person. We can only remove your household so no one can use the service, yourself included. To remove your household, please contact us at mail_courrier@canadapost.postescanada.ca and provide us with the PIN number found on the notice card you received in the mail when you or someone in your household signed up to the service. If you no longer have access to the PIN, you can request a new one.
Notifications
The notifications to your phone tell you whether you do or do not have mail arriving soon, and when you select the notification, it takes you to the My Mailbox app for a more detailed summary. This notification pops up on your home screen once a day in the morning.
The daily alert email arrives in your inbox once a day in the morning summarizing the incoming mail detected by My Mailbox. You can choose to have either one or both of these notifications enabled. Or if you prefer, you can turn off both notifications and consult the app as needed.
You can turn notifications for the mobile app on or off through settings in your app. Under settings, select “notifications”. This will display a toggle to turn notifications on or off. To turn them on, the app will then take you to the settings page in your phone for enabling notifications on this app. After toggling this on, you should then receive notifications to your phone.
You can turn email notifications on and off through the toggle for daily alert emails on the profile screen in the app. The daily alert email is considered a marketing message from Canada Post due to the third-party content displayed. If you have not have consented to receive email subscriptions about mail and package services, you will be prompted to do so when you toggle on the daily alert email.
You can go to profile in the My Mailbox app and make sure the daily alert toggle is on. The daily alert email is considered a marketing message from Canada Post due to the third-party content displayed. If you have not have consented to receive email subscriptions about mail and package services, you cannot receive the daily alert email. You can consent to receive email subscriptions about mail and package services through your profile in the My Mailbox app.
At this time, we are inferring the date of delivery based on the last scan in our processing plants. Unfortunately, these are not 100% accurate and there may be some discrepancies. We encourage you to let us know of any of these issues.
At this time, only letter mail and advertising mail are included in the daily notification. The inclusion of parcels and oversized mail (with dimensions exceeding 245 mm x 156 mm x 5mm) are planned for future releases.
If you no longer wish to receive the email notification, but still want access to the service, you can go into the mobile app under profile and toggle off the daily alert email notifications.
If you wish to stop receiving all emails about mail and package services, including the daily alert email, you can unsubscribe by clicking the link at the bottom of your daily alert.
Other
If you are moving, you need to update your address in the Canada Post account profile. You can do this online via the Canada Post website, or directly in the My Mailbox mobile app by going to your profile. You will be required to go through identity validation questions again. If your new address is eligible for the service, and you pass validation questions, you will start seeing the information for your new address within 48 hours.
Unfortunately, at this time My Mailbox is not integrated with Mail Forwarding. This means that if you move to a new address and have your mail redirected, the service will not capture those mail pieces in your notifications. My Mailbox service will only capture mail addressed to your home, not forwarded.
Also, if you’ve set up hold mail services, the mail pieces that are held through that service won’t appear in your My Mailbox notifications.
We leverage a barcode on the mail piece to identify the sender information and display it for you in the notification. If a mailer has not included the barcode or the required content within it, we have no way to identify who is sending you mail. These types of mail pieces are aggregated under “General mail” in the notification.
At this time, only select mailing addresses are eligible. Your eligibility depends on the mail processing plant associated with your address. If the plant that sorts your mail uses automated sorting equipment, you may be eligible to participate. Plants that sort mail manually cannot currently provide the necessary data for My Mailbox. If your address is not eligible, you’ll be added to a waitlist and contacted once the service is available.
If you’d like to unsubscribe from the My Mailbox service, you can do so within the mobile app by going to settings and select the option to unsubscribe from the beta. Unsubscribing from the beta means we will deactivate the service for your household and delete any data associated with your account.
If you close your Canada Post account, you will no longer be subscribed to My Mailbox and will no longer receive any daily alert emails or have access to the My Mailbox app.
My Mailbox terms and conditions are available here.are available here.
For additional questions or assistance regarding My Mailbox, please contact us at mail_courrier@canadapost.postescanada.ca