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  • Help me test a U(S)PS/FedEx package tracker

Does any of you have a UPS or FedEx or USPS tracking number, and could test something for me?

Through some Internet Archive digging, I found a >14 years old service that is supposed to display the tracking information for those three services, and provide an RSS feed for it, but I would need some packages to track to find out if that really works…

https://simpletracking.com/

If you're scared of sharing the number here, feel free to send it privately on IRC, or send a screenshot of the website, or just tell me if it works at all. I just want to see if I should use present or past tense when posting about it on my rss feed of rss feeds.

There used to be another similar service, but it stopped in 2010: track2rss with a github mirror and these blog posts about it.

It seems to display the tracking data correctly for UPS, but the RSS feed generator throws me a 502.

Interestingly I just got the opposite: I found a random test number 123456789012 that causes it to 502 on the HTML version, and returns an empty RSS feed. Oh well, I guess I can mention it and just say it's half-broken lol

I tried against a real UPS tracking number.

Yeah I guessed that, and thanks 😛 I found this page that says my number is a FedEx test number and the numbers listed in the table actually work well, see this one for example.

So I guess it half-works for UPS, works for FedEx (at least with a testing number), and USPS doesn't seem to have testing numbers so I can't tell that yet.

a month later