Arch-swindler Moist Van Lipwig never believed his confidence crimes were hanging offenses until he found himself with a noose tightly around his neck, dropping through a trapdoor, and falling into a government job with literally mountains of decades-old undelivered mail clogging every nook and cranny of the broken-down post office building; and with only a few creaky old postmen and one rather unstable, pin-obsessed youth available to deliver it. Worse still, Moist could swear the mail is talking to him.