The USPS Emailed Me Collage Material

The USPS offered a service a few years back. You sign up, and you get an email with rough scans of the mail that’s coming for that day. Not all the mail, it rarely scans anything larger than a letter. Getting the daily mail spoiled for me while doing my chores isn’t great, but it’s also a slight benefit. So much of my time is spent scanning work and ephemera, so having a robot do it for me feels like a nice treat. It’s like I have an assistant. Can I get a mail-art assistant?

Since signing up, I have received these emails daily and downloaded each scan into a folder on my computer. That’s thousands of scans…thousands. Normally I do them in groups of two or three because it’s a tedious process, one that I’ve continued to do for years without any justification for doing so. Day in and day out, I check my email, download the scans, and then do nothing with the images produced. More than once, I’ve questioned why I haven’t done anything with the images and almost stopped collecting them. I pushed through.

They’re not good images. Their quality isn’t easily usable. The files are tiny. You can’t print them as is, anything you need intense detail for, you scan in the conventional sense.

I collected images in this fashion until January 2026 when I started to use them. It was all so simple, like most things. A whim produces a nice result and then a whim turns into an obsession. It was simple, all I had to do was bring up the images and digitally cut out (this means I can do it at work during my downtime, like this piece of useless writing) what I thought was interesting and then post that to a bigger piece. I started with Cohen’s braincells in mind. Little images to create a bigger story.  

The first thing I did was play around with a bunch of Richard C. images, just the front of the envelopes, just what I receive in the daily email. For him, the front of the envelopes contains so much of the work. On the envelopes you can see his unique style which has been honed after decades of making mail art. I put them together in a larger digital collage. After that, I broke some of his often-used motifs into a type of visual glossary. I cut out a bunch of the elements that make up his work, and I gave them a name. I picked the items that I admired most about his work, the most unique, the most striking. 

Richard C. Visual Glossary 

10 Envelopes Digitally Collaged 

 

As these things go, you do the thing repeatedly to see what you can learn from repetition. I went through my list of over 800 digital scans direct from the USPS and picked out things that stuck out to me and then dropped those into another creation. This could go on forever. A new toy to play with. While I started with Cohen in mind, I’m thinking about moving more towards Klaus Voorman’s Revolver cover. 

Can you find yourself?