There is something about either forwarding/address changing or this informed delivery that allows USPS to sell your new address to junk mailers. I signed up for both at the same time and was flooded with new junk mail the day I moved in. It gives me a serious distaste for the postal service as an organization.
Mostly not a problem, except when a site does the "ask questions about your credit report to verify identity" thin, and asks about prior addresses I need to watch for that address.
[1] Briefly, me and the neighbors have the same last name. I'm at address 537 Our Street, and they are at 567 Our Street. They submitted a change of address form for 567 Our Street. It turns out the house they live in belonged to the wife before they got married, and in the post office records it is still listed under her maiden name.
So when they filed the change of address, someone at the PO noticed that the name did not match the records for 567, but did match for 537, assumed that it was from me and I had botched entering the address, "fixed" it, and processed it.
The permanent change of address triggers advertising that targets new residents. Restaurants want to try to snag your regular business before you find other options on your own. Hardware stores expect that you might be doing some post-move remodeling. Insurers might try to sell you on a new homeowner or renter policy. Cable and phone companies offer you limited-time deals for new customers.
It's a one-time deluge that tails off pretty quickly. The USPS makes a lot of their revenue from periodicals (2nd class) and marketing (3rd class) mail.
It's time to share the Three Secrets of the regular 20% off one item and $5 off a $15 purchase coupons that BeBo (that's what we call them here) mails out:
0. Ignore what it says on the coupon!
1. The coupons do not expire. No one looks at the expiration date, they just scan the barcode and it always works.
2. You can use any number of coupons in a single purchase as long as they are on different items.
3. If you don't have a coupon with you, you have 30 days to come back with a coupon and your receipt and get the discount refunded.
This is a real dick move. Someone will have that address after you and you leaving your junk behind for them to deal with on an ongoing basis is straight up douche baggery.
This assumes the spam through mail is yours... it is the company's.
The remedy for the next guy is to use a "return to sender: moved, left no address" notation or ink-stamp (or just "refused"), and to leave the articles in the mailbox. If they keep coming, a form 3575z (reason: MLNA) is a little more work, and the postal employee has to submit it, but is like a permanent change of address to /dev/null .
Again, you're leaving your problems for someone who has no connection to you. It should be you who files those forms to stop the mail you don't want to receive, not the poor person who happens to move in after you.
Once again, it's the junk mail originator, and a postal system that readily accepts and delivers said junk mail that is truly at fault here. Everyone else is a victim, and everyone basically gets the same set of junk because practically every address is on several lists at this point.
Again, stop blaming the victims, and start assigning responsibility accurately: to the postal service and to the senders.
The USPS makes too much money from unwanted mailings to make it easy for the recipients to block it.
Besides that, the new resident can always just toss the mail addressed to you in the trash, and the postal service would probably never notice. You only have to jump through the bureaucratic hoops if you are afraid someone might come after you for mishandling mail that isn't yours.
With email spam, costs are so negligible that there's no way it's worth the trouble of removing an address. Every piece of physical mail costs money for printing and postage, so while it's not a big incentive, a cost saving incentive actually does exist.