#1648: MailEmail

Home delivery of goods and services is just not keeping up with the Internet era.

It’s just not good enough for couriers to demand that people stay inside all day to take receipt of items (or that they have to provide a giant metal box to store them).

Today’s invention is a system to be fitted to delivery vans to help receivers predict delivery.

The system starts the day with a list of postcodes for parcels on board each van.

As a GPS sensor detects that the van has come within say 30 minutes of a packet’s destination (taking into account the time required to make the intermediate drop-offs), an email is automatically sent to the householder in question so that they can arrange to be in at the predicted time.

If no acknowledegment is received by the vehicle in transit, it will divert to another delivery destination and may try again later.