iPostal Review: The Biggest and Lowest-Priced Major US Mail Receiving & Forwarding Service Is Good, But Has Limitations

by Ryan Vagabundo

Decided to go with iPostal? You can sign up with this referral link, which helps us out. 

I came to iPostal looking for a simple, straightforward, inexpensive service that could receive my mail and give me flexible forwarding options anywhere within the US with incoming mail visibility and control via a "digital inbox." For that purpose, iPostal is pretty good. You certainly won't get a lower price or more flexible terms. 

It is kinda the "Walmart one-size-fits-all" option of this world, however, so there are some restrictions and cautions to be aware of. I can see where it might not work well for some people's purposes, and it's very important to be careful of the "home base" location you pick for your mail; they aren't all equally good. 

COMPANY HISTORY

When shopping for a mail service, one of the primary things you're concerned with is the company's legitimacy and reputation (especially if you're receiving packages or mail with sensitive personal information). The core iPostal corporation is good on this count. It launched in 2015, and very quickly became the most recognizable name among these sorts of services in the US, but it's built off of an international shipping business that has existed since 2007. 

The key thing to understand about iPostal is that its rapid growth comes from not operating its own facilities. It instead partners with a network of local businesses that now spans about 2,500 locations throughout the US, and just gives them the digital infrastructure to manage everything. Now, this is where things get a little more dicey ...

BE CAREFUL WHEN CHOOSING A LOCATION

When you sign up for iPostal, you'll be asked to pick one of these locations as your "home base" for receiving mail. The website just gives you a list of addresses to choose from in each city or zip code you view, implying they are all equal. They are not.

All of these locations do, as far as I am aware, meet the most basic standard of being registered "commercial mail receiving agencies," the federal requirement to legally be able to receive mail on other people's behalf. However, there's great variance between them from there and you'll have to do your own due diligence since the iPostal website is not overly helpful in this area. 

One of the things that caused the iPostal location count to go through the roof was its early 2021 partnership with office supply chain Staples. Most Staples locations can now be used as an iPostal address. Great, right? Staples are all over the place. Well, not so much. 

If you browse Staples employee discussion forums, primarily Reddit, you'll quickly see the problem here. Staples appears to have dropped this on them without much warning or training. There are copious stories of employees not knowing how to handle mail, or potentially tossing it in unsafe places, or losing it entirely. And just in general, do you really want your sensitive mail or packages going to a retail store with typical retail employee turnover? At the very least, they are definitely not happy about having this extra work and source of irate people walking in to complain about something.

Fortunately, iPostal is still useful due to its pre-existing network of local "mom and pop" mailbox and shipping places. There are probably some bad apples out there, but there are lots of trustworthy businesses of this type, and you can look up online reviews of them to get a sense of how established and honest they are. I've rented from several of these places over the years in several different cities, and I noticed that all of the ones that I really liked are in the iPostal network. 

But, again, the iPostal site doesn't tell you what business is at what address. It just gives you a plain list of addresses for each city. So it really helps to do the signup process on a computer with a web browser, instead of a mobile phone, as you can open a second tab and Google each address to see what it is. 

You run into another issue when you start doing this: iPostal occasionally lists an address that has closed or has moved to another location. I browsed four cities and found three locations of this sort. One had moved to a different address about two years ago, but the other two just appeared to be empty storefronts with no information at all available about them. 

So it takes some picking and pruning, but iPostal does have a good amount of reputable mail services to choose from, particularly in larger cities. 

THE SIGNUP PROCESS

You can choose a location anywhere you like, you don't have to physically go there at all, or have residence in that state. The identification check process is pretty simple and can be handled entirely online, but they do kind of spring it on you after you've already gone through the full signup and paid for the first month. 

It's the same standard process you would go through to rent a mailbox in person, just filling out a Post Office form 1583. In person the mail service usually has notaries on staff and signs off on it for you at no extra cost, but with iPostal you'll have to get it notarized yourself. They offer a digital partner service that will do it all online for $25, but if you go to a local notary you'll find the going price is usually more like $10. 

One potential hangup in this process is that they do require two forms of ID to sign up, and one needs to have the residential address that you sign up for your account with on it. This can be done with a state driver's license and utility or phone bill, lease or vehicle registration with the correct address. However, if you're using the state ID as the source of the address, then you'll need a SECOND photo ID. However, that one doesn't have to have the address, so you can use a passport or passport card, or a university ID, maybe even some sort of medical care ID if it has a photo on it. You'll also need a credit or debit card to pay your bill. 

You can use your phone to take photos of the ID, and the notary form if you went the in-person route, and you just upload them through a prompt in your digital inbox (which you get access to right away when you sign up, though the "home base" can't legally receive mail for you until they get your forms and ID and approve them, which took a few days for me). 

RULES AND PRICING

There are a few options that range up to $40/month, but the cheapest plan ("green") is $10 per month if you go month-to-month, or $99 to prepay a full year. 

The main difference is the amount of mail you can receive before you start getting charged a per-piece fee (of 35 cents). With the green plan you get 30 pieces per month, minus obvious "junk mail" (like the ubiquitous "you're PRE-SELECTED to apply" credit card offers). Your mail location will shred and dispose of that stuff for you for free, but you can see it in your digital inbox first to determine what to do with it. 

Part of iPostal's low monthly pricing is that they get you on added fees, and depending on your mail situation you may have to constantly be on top of things to keep them from piling up. When you receive mail, basically the only thing that can be done with it for free is discard (without shredding) or return it, or possibly pick it up physically in person (if your location doesn't charge an extra fee, which I didn't see visible on the iPostal site). Anything else costs at least a little something.

The main thing you'll probably want to do is have mail forwarded, which you can set to have done at regular intervals or simply have done on request. You'll have to pay the actual cost of this, with various shipping options available. Letters and regular mail are consolidated for free, but consolidating packages or magazines is an additional $1.95 per shipment. The free storage period is 30 days for letters and very small boxes, 10 days for medium boxes and 5 days for large boxes ... it's a pretty steep $1.10 per item per month fee for items held beyond that of all sizes. Scanning and shredding will cost at least $2.25, for up to 10 pages or shredding unopened envelopes (25 cents per page beyond that). 

WHO IS IPOSTAL BEST FOR?

If you just need a mailbox, a local physical box is going to be a better value than this nearly anywhere. You'll pay either the same amount or only a few bucks more, but without all the extra fees and management. 

I can think of a few use cases offhand where iPostal is a good choice, though, due to the ability to easily forward to any other iPostal location for pickup:

> You expect to be moving around constantly and unpredictably

> You have a "home area" you're often in, but you expect to be gone from it for multiple consecutive months at a time and forwarding from your local mailbox service isn't available/won't work for some reason

> You want to remotely set up an address in a specific state or town without having to physically go there

If any of those are the case, and you aren't expecting a high volume of mail, iPostal is probably the cheapest and most flexible option you'll find. And the month-to-month terms do make it easy to close up shop and switch to another service if you do expect to start getting larger volumes of regular mail at some point. Just be sure to screen your home base location carefully before you sign up!

Decided to go with iPostal? You can sign up with this referral link, which helps us out.