Hacker News Reader

Comment by spike021 | Hacker News Reader

I wish there were a way to list all previous inhabitants of my apartment address who still get mail sent here and somehow tell USPS "no, they no longer live here". I routinely, in both of my previous apartments, receive(d) mail for at least 3-5 people who lived here before me. Many of them important documents, like from the DMV. Yes I know I can "mark" them with a pen/sharpie as having moved, but I don't always bring a pen to my mailbox with me to do that with. There must be an easier way.

View on HN

Doesn't matter if you mark that mail "return to sender"/"addressee unknown"/"does not live here", or if you report it to the USPS, or anything else you do. They just ignore you and continue to send it anyhow. (At least that's been my personal experience with this exact issue.)

Call the post office. They will typically ask you to put your last name on the inside of your box and then they will tell the carrier to only deliver mail with your name (or ‘Current Resident’ obviously). If you’re lucky, your carrier is nice and respects that immediately. If you’re not lucky, you may have to call the post office every day for a month and complain like I did until they get the point. Eventually that kind of mail stopped.

I’m not sure what they do with all that mail that’s not addressed to me but I don’t really care. The point is I don’t have to see it.

This, along with the other tips in these comments (such as calling customer support lines and requesting removals) means I’m down to literally about one piece of junk mail per month these days.

At least for this current apartment, my last name has already been on a sticky-note attached to the door since I moved in. Guessing the friendly mailman did it. Yet that hasn't stopped the deluge of junk not addressed to me finding its way there (I don't blame the mailman, he's a really cool guy and probably just can't do much about it).

Any piece of mail marked "Current Resident" gets deposited directly to the trash, so if it doesn't specifically have my name on it, don't waste energy bringing it to me.

> I don't always bring a pen to my mailbox

My wife had the actually great idea to leave a pen in the mailbox for this purpose. It works really well.

I take the effort of marking them "return to sender" and throwing them in a mailbox for outbound mail. I don't know if they actually get sent back, but my hope is that if the important mail gets sent back the org that sent it will try and find their new address.

I've been tempted to buy a rubber stamp with "return to sender" or "not at this address" or whatever. I don't relish the thought of spending money to deal with other people's problems, though.

In any case after a few years I just toss their mail in the trash, junk or otherwise. If they don't care to file change of address forms then I don't care either. I don't think this is technically legal, though.

If it’s second class mail (has a long barcode on it) that does nothing, but it’s also safe to throw away.

Isn’t throwing it away a federal crime?

They don't care about bulk mail, if you try to return it it'll just be destroyed anyway.

If it's not addressed to you at all then you should probably return it of course.

I occasionally receive mail addressed to my mother, who not only does not live with me, but has never even been to the state I currently live in. I assumed this was a chain of horribly mishandled mail forwarding requests the n times I've moved since I last lived with her ~10 years ago.

Recently I got one for my brother, who moved out a couple of years before I did.

Apparently there is such a thing as an “employee generated change of address” that can be used to return mail to the sender through the automatic forwarding system.

For rural routes the carrier is supposed to put a card requesting the names of addresses when someone news moves in. I’m not sure what they do with this info but I think they can potentially do something with mail not addressed to your while casing their mail.

I overheard someone being told to put a card in the box about the issue and if that didn’t work to come back and they would enter a COA. But my own post office didn’t seem to know that option and just said to tape a paper on the box door saying “only deliver for X.”

We get several hand-addressed Christmas cards for people who haven't lived at our address for at least 22 years. I always write "RTS/no longer at this address" but they keep coming.

Billy Woods talks about this phenomenon on the outro of Speak Gently

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXFgjQ9dZ8M&t=2m46s

In Canada, you can call or simply add a post it on the letter saying "this person moved". The mailman will reroute future letters.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com