Mail cover

Mail cover is a law enforcement investigative technique in which the United States Postal Service, acting at the request of a law enforcement agency, records information from the outside of letters and parcels before they are delivered and then sends the information to the agency that requested it.

Mail covers can be requested to investigate criminal activity or to protect national security.

On average the Postal Service grants 15,000 to 20,000 criminal activity requests each year.

Postal Regulations 39 CFR 233.3[4] and the Internal Revenue Manual[5] as follows: As mail cover does not involve the reading of the mail but only information on the outside of the envelope or package that could be read by anyone seeing the item anyway, it is not considered by court precedent a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

[8] According to official statistics obtained through a FOIA request by the National Law Journal, the number of mail covers in 1984 was 9,022 and increased to 14,077 in 2000.