Informed Visibility.
Every scan, every piece, in real time.

USPS Informed Visibility — formally Informed Visibility for Mail Tracking & Reporting, or IV-MTR — is the modern USPS service that exposes per-piece mail scan events as a near-real-time data feed. Authorized mailers connect to IV-MTR to receive every scan event generated at every USPS sortation facility on the way to the recipient. It is the foundation for per-piece tracking dashboards, scan-triggered automation, predicted delivery windows, and accurate ROI attribution. IV-MTR replaced the older Mail Tracking & Reporting service in 2017.

Every scan generated by USPS sortation infrastructure on a piece carrying an IMb. That includes origin entry, network distribution center (NDC), sectional center facility (SCF), and the destination delivery unit (DDU) — the final scan before the carrier picks up the tray for delivery. The events include the IMb, the facility, the operation code, the timestamp, and the predicted delivery window where USPS has computed one. No scan is omitted from the feed.

The legacy Mail Tracking & Reporting (MTR) service ran on a daily batch model and required mailers to pull data on a polling cycle. IV-MTR runs as a continuous push feed with scan events available within minutes of the actual scan, plus richer event metadata and standardized data structures. The modern service is what makes per-piece automation triggers — like the USPS Scan Trigger that fires email on the DDU scan — operationally viable. The polling-based legacy service couldn't meet the latency requirement.

USPS computes a Predicted Delivery Window (PDW) per piece based on the actual scan history and the destination. As the piece moves through sortation, the window narrows. By the time the piece reaches the DDU, the PDW is typically a same-day or next-business-day window. DirectMail.io surfaces the PDW per record on the campaign dashboard, so the team can see exactly when each recipient is expected to see the mail piece — not when the drop "should" deliver in the aggregate.

IV-MTR is the engine behind the platform's scan-triggered automation. The clearest example is the USPS Scan Trigger feature, which fires a queued campaign email to a recipient the moment that recipient's specific mail piece records its DDU scan. Email and mail co-land the same day. The same scan-event stream powers customer-facing tracking, real-time dashboards, predicted-delivery alerts, and automation hooks for downstream systems like CRM and ad platforms via API and webhooks.

Yes. USPS does not charge for IV-MTR access — it is a service available to authorized mailers as part of the broader USPS data infrastructure. The work is in the integration: maintaining a continuous authorized connection, processing the event stream at scale, and tying each event back to the right campaign, recipient, and downstream automation. DirectMail.io owns that integration end-to-end, which is why scan events surface in the dashboard within minutes of the physical scan.

Yes. Scan events are available through the platform REST API and as webhook events on every lifecycle moment — drop, scan, delivery, exception. Teams routinely pipe the events into CRM systems, BI dashboards, or ad-platform automation triggers. The raw IV-MTR event payload is preserved alongside the platform-tagged metadata, so downstream systems get both the USPS scan record and the campaign context.