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Nearly all my mail ends up at addresses from my past. If it wasn't for e-bills, I would never receive (my own) bills. And I have received mountains of mail from countless former tenants at every place I've lived, mail they will never see. The post doesn't seem very reliable to me.

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USPS needs to implement a form of indirect addressing. The basic premise: Assign recipients a unique ID. The physical address is then a single indirect lookup (ie. from a database, which can be altered by the recipient ad nauseum).

For obvious reasons, SSN as a unique ID is out. Given the (relative) portability of phone numbers, these might be a good option. Alternatively, allowing users to employ their email address as the unique ID would be awesome! I'd pay an annual fee to USPS if senders could just write my email on an envelope and it would get to me (bonus points for selective digitization).

I think this is one of the beauties of Google Voice service: It's indirect addressing for my phone number. If USPS took some initiative, they could really invigorate their service and bring it into the technical age.

a database, which can be altered by the recipient ad nauseum

They already have this, of course. You can send USPS a change-of-address form and they'll send mail addressed to you at your old address to your new address. https://moversguide.usps.com/icoa/icoa-main-flow.do?executio...

I did this just last month. The postal worker informed me that the forwarding only lasted for a period of one year -- that's not a very good long-term solution.

That's kind of your problem.

If you used an old email address, you wouldn't get e-bills either.

The difference is I don't change my email once every year or so.

...but that's less about the postal systems than it is about people updating addresses or forwarding mail on.

I have some rubber stamps made with

    ADDRESSEE GONE AWAY
     RETURN TO SENDER

and that seems to cut down the amount of repeated post. You can dump all the post for one person in a big envelope and dump that in a post box once a month.

And how it works after that? USPS just return mail to sender with no questions asked? I recently bought a house and also receiving bunch of mails. Once - check for few hundreds of some refund from some utility company. Thanks I had contact info of previous tenant, so I could mail it to him (never got a thanks letter :))

>>And how it works after that? USPS just return mail to sender with no questions asked?

Yes, of course.

Oye, no joke. I get more mail for former residents of my home than I do for me. We have filled out the form to stop delivering that mail. Didn't work. We have called the mail annex the carriers leave from. Didn't work. We have left the carriers a friggin note. Didn't work. Also, my sister-in-law just sent us something she made for my daughter, which USPS promptly lost and did nothing to attempt to find. Granted she didn't add delivery confirmation on the package, but should I really have to pay extra to make sure my package will actually get there? If that is the case, raise the price of stamps to cover it.

They only forward mail for a year. That should be plenty of time to change your addresses. It seems that you don't though.

It is reliable if the address that's on the piece of mail is where it was sent to. The issue then is whoever's maintaining the address and paying to postage for sending it there.

Also mail forwarding's worked pretty well for me. Just fill the info online or drop the card in the mail.

The benefit of this is outrunning junk mail.

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