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| 2. Databases mapping all American households exist.

And they can be pretty comprehensive. Short anecdote but the last time I moved, and before I had updated any address information on my accounts/ID, the first piece of non-forwarded mail I received addressed to me was a credit card offer from AMEX. I still have absolutely no clue how they knew where exactly to send it to me.

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I'm assuming a lot here but there is always the chance that your door-to-door post man or woman went to deliver any generic piece of mail to your old address only to find out you no longer lived there. I'm fairly sure there is a mechanism in place where a post man or post office can set a recipient as "moved" or "moving" to let the entire postal system know that until that recipients new address is figured out that no mail should be going to the old address.

That said the cynic in me won't allow the positive optimist within me to win this one. While I do believe there to be many wonderful postal workers I am going to assume that corporate greed is winning out over the kindness and caring of the human heart in this specific situation :(

There is that mechanism but you have to trigger it yourself via the USPS website or by going to the local post office.

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