USPS calls it a Daily Digest email, and that is as specific as its own pages get — there is no published clock time on usps.com or on USPS's PostalPro product page, checked 2026-08-30. What USPS does commit to is which days get nothing at all: no mail for the address that day, plus every Sunday and federal holiday, on top of a plain warning that the preview and the physical piece do not always arrive on the same schedule.
USPS describes when it arrives loosely and describes when it does not arrive very precisely.
Two USPS-owned pages were checked directly for a specific hour: the consumer product page at usps.com/manage/informed-delivery.htm, and the PostalPro product page at postalpro.usps.com/id, aimed at mailers rather than consumers. Neither states a clock time.
Get Daily Digest emails that preview your mail and packages scheduled to arrive soon.USPS, Informed Delivery — Mail & Package Notifications, usps.com/manage/informed-delivery.htm, read 2026-08-30
“Scheduled to arrive soon” is the whole published commitment. USPS describes the digest as a daily email and never attaches an hour to it, on either page checked. Widely repeated figures like “by 9 a.m.” circulate on blogs and third-party guides, but none of it traces to a USPS-owned page as of this check, so this page does not print a specific hour as fact. Treat the email as an early-in-the-day event on days it sends at all, and use the dashboard, covered next, if a specific hour matters to you.
The same USPS sentence that describes the email also describes a second, faster channel sitting right next to it.
The dashboard is the other half of the same product, and USPS describes it as reachable from a phone, a computer or the Informed Delivery mobile app rather than on the digest's schedule. The email is a once-a-day digest; the online dashboard and the mobile app are not bound to that same single daily send, and can be opened whenever you want to check rather than waiting for an inbox notification. For anyone checking Informed Delivery against a specific window — a delivery expected before noon, say — the dashboard is the more current source of the two, precisely because it is not gated behind a once-a-day email.
USPS names two distinct conditions that stop the digest, and they are easy to conflate because both simply look like “nothing arrived today.”
“You'll only get mail preview notifications on days that you're getting mail. (You won't get them on Sundays or federal holidays, either.)”
USPS, Informed Delivery — Mail & Package Notifications, usps.com/manage/informed-delivery.htm, read 2026-08-30.
Read as two rules rather than one: an address with no letter-sized mail running through the automated sorting equipment that day gets nothing, independent of the calendar, and separately, the calendar itself removes Sundays and federal holidays outright regardless of mail volume. A quiet inbox on a Tuesday with no obvious holiday is therefore normal — it usually just means nothing scannable was headed to that address that morning, not that the service has stopped working.
“Mail and packages may not arrive the same day you get a notification — please allow several days for delivery,” per the same USPS page. A preview reflects a piece as it comes off that route's sorting run for the morning, which is a snapshot of the network, not a promise about the truck. Treat a notification as confirmation something is in the pipeline heading your way, and treat the several-day allowance as the honest range rather than an exception. For a package that needs an actual committed window rather than a preview, that is a tracking number's job, not Informed Delivery's; our full Informed Delivery explainer covers what the feature shows, who is eligible, and what it costs beyond just the timing question answered here.
USPS revises its product pages without notice, and could add a specific send time in the future. Treat the absence noted above as accurate for the date shown, not as a permanent fact.
USPS calls it a Daily Digest email and does not publish a specific clock time for it, on its own consumer page or on its PostalPro product page. Expect it early in the day rather than at a fixed minute, and treat any specific hour quoted elsewhere as an outside estimate, not a USPS commitment.
Yes. USPS offers the same previews through a once-a-day digest email and through a dashboard reachable from a phone, a computer or the Informed Delivery mobile app, which means the account and the app are not tied to the email's schedule and can be checked whenever you want rather than waiting for it to land.
No. USPS states you'll only get mail preview notifications on days that you're getting mail, separately from the Sunday and holiday exclusion, so an address with nothing running through the automated sorting equipment that day gets no email at all.
Yes. USPS's own page states plainly that you won't get them on Sundays or federal holidays, either, on top of the no-mail-that-day rule. Both exclusions can apply in the same week without one explaining the other.
Because the preview reflects a piece as it comes off the sorting run for that route, not a delivery promise. USPS's own guidance is to allow several days for delivery after a notification, since a preview and the physical piece do not always travel on the same timeline.