How do you get your mail? Does the letter carrier push it through a slot built into your front door? Or maybe you have a mailbox mounted on a post in front of your house. If you don’t have a mailbox or a mail slot, perhaps you get your mail through a local post office box. At any rate, homeowners with mailboxes can now monitor their mail with a new mailbox sensor.

CNN’s Jason Cipriani recently reviewed a mailbox sensor from the same company that first introduced the video doorbell. Ring’s sensor mounts to the door of your mailbox and sends you an alert whenever the door is opened and closed. The sensor is essentially a motion detector for your mail.

Cipriani’s review described how he mounted the device on his own mailbox. He also reviewed the device’s performance. In a nutshell, Ring’s mailbox sensor is a simple device that relies on motion to determine whether or not someone has accessed your mailbox. It cannot tell you what’s in your box. It also cannot tell you if someone has removed something rather than placing something inside.

• Commercial Sensors for the Home

Most people reading this post will not be surprised to learn about the mailbox sensor. After all, the volume of commercial sensors designed for home use has grown exponentially over the last two decades. We encounter so many sensors every single day that we are oblivious to most of them.

While California-based Rock West Solutions is busily working on new commercial sensors for business and industry, you and I are interacting with sensors whenever we use our phones, turn on our TVs, or even open our refrigerator doors. The thing is that sensors are everywhere.

The burning question posed by this post is as follows: in a world with so many sensors, do you really need a motion detector for your mail? Your answer probably depends on how secure you feel your mailbox is. And if you do not feel it’s secure, maybe that bothers you.

• Know When the Box Is Opened

The only real benefit of the mailbox sensor is knowing when someone opens your box. But why would that matter? It depends. Maybe you run a small business from your home, a business that has you out on the road for most of the day. You might want to know when your mail arrives simply because your business involves a lot of paperwork going in and out.

There are undoubtedly some consumers who would want a mailbox sensor only because they are super diligent about home security. They want to know every time the mailbox is open for the express purpose of determining whether or not anyone but the postal carrier is accessing it.

• The Market Will Decide

As far as sensors go, Ring’s mailbox sensor does what it is supposed to do. Any modicum of retail success will encourage other home security component makers to come up with competing products. If no one cares about the mailbox sensor, it will quietly disappear on its own. That is how things work when the market decides success and failure.

In the meantime, you can bet that companies like Rock West Solutions will keep coming up with innovative sensors for measuring and monitoring all sorts of data. There is no escaping that the world we live in is driven by sensors. They are prolific.

If you are worried about your mailbox, you can now keep track of it with a sensor. Never go another day without knowing exactly when your mail is delivered. How is that for progress?

Danny Watson