Re: e-mail forwarding, for-pay remailers

["E. ALLEN SMITH" <EALLENSMITH@ocelot.Rutgers.EDU>]

From:	IN%"stewarts@ix.netcom.com"  "Bill Stewart" 14-DEC-1995 03:22:12.75

>There are two different sets of relevant rules in the US - Post Office and
state.
The PO's primary interest is making sure you don't mind if they don't
forward your mail once you stop using the Commercial Mail Receiving Agent
(CMRA) and secondarily that you aren't committing fraud by using the mailbox,
sending people change-of-address notices, ripping off your creditors, and
skipping town.  California has a hopelessly dishonest law that just went
into effect in 1995, which pretends to be designed to protect consumers from
fraud by the 7 million small businesses in CA that uses mailboxes,
and actually requires that _anybody_, business or not, who wants to rent
a mailbox must fill out the Post Office form and also appoint the PO or CMRA
as their agent for service of process and give them up-to-date True Addresses.
The PO, meanwhile, "usually wants" a California Driver's License plus another ID
to rent a box from them.  (I didn't have such a thing when I last rented a box,
and the PO hassled my mailbox company into asking for one when the new law
came out.)  After many attempts at calling the PO to get anybody
who knows the _official_ rules for what ID is required, I found a PO lawyer 
who told me the rules are in the "Domestic Mail Manual", which any
Postmaster has, so my next step is to look up one of those before I next get
a mailbox.

So maybe a random photo ID will work, such as your FooBar Consulting
Employee ID, and maybe it won't, depending on what state you live in and how
clueless your local Post Office bureaucrats are.
-----------------
	The more critical question is likely to be what the people at the local
MBE/whatever _think_ the rules are. When I last got a box (under my real name,
in case anyone's wondering), I seem to recall that they'd accept credit cards.
Once one has one box under a given name, this opens up the possibility of
getting a secured credit card to make future access easier. However, I believe
that they do want at least one form of photo ID; I can't remember just off what
their specifications were.
	-Allen