USPS Newsroom

active ●Ingestion health: delivering Executive · Tier 2 · RSS feed · Independent establishment

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What this source is

The United States Postal Service is an independent establishment providing mail and package delivery. This autodiscovered RSS feed carries national news releases — stamp issuances, rates, service changes, and operations — as lede-paragraph descriptions with unusually deep history (668 items, ~270 characters each, no GUIDs); feed links route through a JavaScript redirect interstitial that carries no article text.

Identity and registry record

Registry id

usps-newsroom

Agency / parent organization

Independent establishment

Branch

executive

Type

RSS feed

Status

active

Tier

2

URL (feed)

https://about.usps.com/news/latestnews.rss (opens in a new tab)

URL (home)

https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/ (opens in a new tab)

Registered

2026-07-26

Registry notes

Probed 2026-07-26; captured bytes re-examined 2026-07-28: feed verified — 668 items, ~270-char lede-paragraph descriptions with datelines, no GUIDs. Every feed link routes through /newsroom/rssrequest.htm?nr=<article-path>, and the captured sample-article bytes are that 1.8 KB JavaScript redirect interstitial, not an article: it embeds NO content (no JSON-LD, no framework state blob; its entire visible text is 'RSS Feed Request' — the probe's 16-char extraction). The real article pages at /newsroom/<nr> were never fetched, so their extractability is unknown, not proven bad. The usps adapter therefore: (1) derives document identity by statically resolving nr= to the canonical article URL, normalized (lowercase host, query/fragment/trailing slash stripped) — dedupes URL variants despite the missing GUIDs; (2) ingests feed-metadata only (title + lede description, mode feed-only), never spending a request per item on the known-contentless interstitial. Can extract: titles, ~270-char ledes, claimed dates, canonical article URLs. Cannot extract: full article text — would require a deliberate re-probe of a resolved direct article URL (e.g. /newsroom/national-releases/2026/...htm) before any change to this posture.

How we ingest it

Channel

RSS feed

Method

RSS poll via AgencyClient, feed-metadata only (usps adapter; pending content evaluation)

Adapter

usps

Poll cadence

about every 60 minutes while the collector runs

Request budget

the agency class: at most 3,000 requests per day shared across every agency web source, counted from the fetch log (failed requests count too)

Politeness

robots.txt is honored as observed — including each host's crawl-delay, exactly — and every request identifies itself as fapd/0.1 (Free Agentic Publication Digester; +https://fapd.info/bot.html; contact: hustleyourcity@gmail.com); a refusal is recorded, never evaded

Capture and hash

captured raw content is hashed (SHA-256) into the day's committed provenance manifest, hash-chained day to day (PROVENANCE.md)

Ingestion health

●Ingestion health: delivering 7 item(s) in the last 14 days; most recent 2026-09-25; 0 of 354 request(s) to about.usps.com returned no content.

This label has held since 2026-09-08T15:31:58Z (UTC) and was last re-checked 2026-09-29T10:51:00Z (UTC).

Counts are of our own requests, retries included. A 4xx or 5xx is the server declining to return content — that may be load, maintenance, on-demand generation, or a limit the publisher sets, and we cannot tell which from outside. Nothing here is a measurement of the publisher.

Ingestion statistics

These figures describe this project's ingestion of this source — items we recorded and requests we made — and nothing else. They are not a measurement of the publisher.

Last 24 hours

Last 14 days

All time

Last 30 days, day by day

Each day runs midnight to midnight on Eastern time (Washington, D.C.), the publication day the digests use; the stored request stamps remain UTC.

Our ingestion assessment