You've got mail!

Or 'Thoughts on the Postal system'

I am away from my house in the UK for long periods, and I don't want the post office to forward my mail on to the country I'm in. Firstly, because it would probably be prohibitively expensive, and secondly because it is around 80% spam.
However, registering the fact that I am out of the country with official bodies, such as the council, the IR and DVLA etc, is next to impossible. They will send me one letter to my foreign address, then revert to my UK address afterwards.
This leads me to the verge of prosecution for non-response and non-payment of various trivial amounts and nearly always ends up in me shelling out fines when I do visit the house in the UK.

Given that the Post Office have to do some scanning of the mail anyway, as part of the sorting process, why don't they offer a service where you can see your mail online and then request a delivery when you need it.
I could also select the obvious junk mail (from prior offenders) and choose not to have it delivered at all. The following features would seem to be relatively simple to implement:

• All bills/financial demands franked with a special Post Office stamp or barcode (can be delivered as software to sending companies)
  
• Other types of content franked with similar codes to enable classification
• E.g. statement of existing account
• Special Offer
• Urgent attention required
• Scanned Image of envelope held online
• RSS feed for all mail arriving at the Post Office
  
• Mail retained by Post Office until requested by customer (or threshold reached)
• Return to sender/Not known at this address/Forward to; can all be done online before the mail even gets delivered
• Less deliveries, so Post Office saves money
• Less crap mail, so customer is happy

This is no more than a mail filter, in much the same way that we filter email.

It's surprising, given the cost of 'last-mile' delivery, that the post office haven't investigated integrating the mail delivery into the online world.

Personally, I would rather have everything delivered electronically, but I suspect that we won't see Tax and Council Charge demands being sent to our email addresses any time soon.
Still, a register of house addresses and default email addresses associated to them might make it easier for companies to contact individuals who are abroad or who have moved to a different physical location.