The machine, in detail
What actually happens between your question and the government's answer.
This page is longer than a marketing page should be, on purpose. The parts of this discipline that decide whether it works are unglamorous, and hiding them would make the archive harder to check.
Two ways in
The Docket — proposed, voted, funded
Free. Anyone with a Thaumatica account drafts a request: target agency, records sought, date range, justification, fee-waiver argument. Not a wish — a finished letter. It enters the public queue, where the community ranks it by vote and funds it by contribution. At quorum it is filed and tracked in public.
Votes sort the queue. Money moves it. Both signals are public and attributable, and a human review gate sits between quorum and filing.
Commission — filed directly
A member files immediately and pays the cost themselves. It skips the Docket and goes straight to review and filing. Same pipeline, same public tracking, same publication — the only difference is who paid and how fast it started.
Members on the highest tier may pay a surcharge to embargo a request. The embargo hides the subject, never the existence.
Getting it there
There is no single door. Federal components mostly take email or run a portal; a handful still want a fax; and a great many county and municipal bodies have neither, answer only paper, and are governed by a statute with a shorter clock than the federal one. Aletheca routes per agency, tries channels in order, and records the fallback when one fails.
Agency portal
no carrier costFOIAXpress PAL, SecureRelease, eFOIA, NextRequest, GovQA and the rest. Free, immediate, and usually returns a tracking number within a day. Submission is scripted per portal because there is no common API.
Receipt: Portal confirmation number, captured as a screenshot and a PDF.
Email
no carrier costThe default for most federal components and a great many state bodies. Sent from a per-request alias so every reply routes itself, with delivery and fetch events recorded.
Receipt: SMTP delivery confirmation, plus classified fetch events.
Fax
$0.25A minority of agencies still specify it and a few still prefer it. Cheap, and the transmission report is a genuinely useful receipt when an agency later says nothing arrived.
Receipt: Transmission report with page count and remote CSID.
Physical mail
$0.89Required by statute in some states and by habit in many localities. Printed, folded, metered and inducted by a print vendor, with every carrier scan pushed back as an event.
Receipt: Carrier scan events; a signature image where the class provides one.
Paper, priced honestly
A mailed request is a choice about evidence rather than speed. Certified mail proves the agency received it; certified with an electronic return receipt produces the signature image that matters if the request ever reaches a courtroom. Every class produces its own carrier events, and each one appears on the request’s public timeline as it happens.
| Class | All-in | Days | What it proves | Events |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First-Class Mail | $1.89 | 3–7 | Proof that we mailed it, and nothing else. | 2 |
| Certified Mailrecommended | $7.89 | 3–7 | Proof of mailing and electronic delivery confirmation. | 4 |
| Certified + electronic return receipt | $11.89 | 3–7 | Everything above, plus a downloadable image of the signature the agency's mailroom gave. This is the artefact that matters if the request ever goes to court. | 5 |
| Priority Mail | $12.49 | 1–3 | Tracking end to end. Worth it only when a statutory clock is about to matter. | 4 |
| Priority Mail Express | $32.99 | 1–2 | Next-day where the network reaches, with a signature on delivery. | 5 |
- Physical return receipt (the green card)$4.40
The card comes back to the virtual address, gets scanned, and is attached to the request as an image. Slower and dearer than the electronic version; a handful of state courts still prefer it.
- Restricted delivery$7.25
Only the named FOIA officer may sign. Useful precisely once: when an agency claims the request never reached the right desk.
- Signature confirmation$4.15
A signature without the certified paper trail. Cheaper, and enough for most state bodies.
- Prepaid return envelope$2.75
A stamped envelope addressed to the virtual mailbox, enclosed with the request. Measurably raises the response rate from small local bodies that would otherwise have to find postage.
Reading the government’s mail
Agencies answer on paper far more often than anyone expects, and the paper arrives with no thread, no case number on the envelope, and sometimes no legible case number inside it either. So Aletheca holds a physical address whose mail is opened, scanned and returned through an API within minutes, OCR’d, and pushed into the same pipeline an email would enter.
Every outbound letter prints the request id in its own return address, so the envelope that comes back carries the binding on the outside. Every outbound email is sent from a per-request alias at req.aletheca.com, so a reply routes itself with no inference at all. The green card, where one is used, is scanned and attached to the request as an image.
Matching a reply to its request
- 01
Per-request alias · certain
The reply arrived at an address that exists for exactly one request.
- 02
The ATTN line · certain
The request id, printed in our return address, read straight off the scanned envelope.
- 03
Agency case number · near-certain
Bound to the request when the agency acknowledged it; every later letter carries it.
- 04
Thread headers · high
In-Reply-To and References on an email that came back on the wrong address.
- 05
Fuzzy · scored
Agency, date window and subject similarity. Never used alone above the threshold.
- 06
Human triage · —
Below the threshold, it goes to a person. The queue is public.
The method and its confidence are printed on the request page next to the letter, so a reader who thinks a binding is wrong can see exactly what it was based on.
What a “read receipt” is actually worth
Outbound email carries a tracking pixel, and Aletheca records every fetch of it. What it does not do is tell you the agency read your letter, because that claim would be false most of the time.
Mail security in front of a federal tenancy — Defender for Office 365, Proofpoint, Mimecast — opens every image and follows every link before a human sees the message, usually within seconds of delivery. Apple Mail Privacy Protection pre-loads images on a proxy for messages nobody opens. Gmail serves images through a cache that can re-fetch the same pixel repeatedly as a reader scrolls. Any product that turns those signals into “opened 4 times” is selling you a number it knows is wrong.
So each fetch is stored raw, classified, and displayed with its classification. The useful, honest inference is narrow and worth having: the message reached a live mailbox at that agency, which is exactly the fact in dispute when an agency later says nothing ever arrived.
Fetch classifications
Security scanner
Fetched by a mail-security appliance, usually within seconds of delivery. Not a read.
Image proxy
Fetched through a provider cache — Gmail or Apple Mail Privacy Protection. Tells us the message reached a mailbox and nothing more.
Probable human
Fetched from a client and network profile consistent with someone opening the message. Still an inference, never a certainty.
The part that decides whether any of this works
Filing is cheap. Follow-up is the whole cost. Agencies routinely run months past the twenty-business-day statutory deadline, and a request that is not chased simply dies — quietly, with nobody notified, and with the requester assuming it is still in a queue somewhere.
Aletheca runs the clock on a schedule rather than on somebody’s memory. The deadline breach is recorded as a fact about the agency and rolled into its scorecard. Follow-ups go out automatically and are published as they go. When administrative remedies are exhausted, the disposition changes to constructive denial — which is not a failure state, it is the precondition for an appeal.
49 distinct event types are recorded across the pipeline. Every one of them is public unless it names a person or a payment card, and every one is available on the API and by webhook.