Any way to stop mail for previous residents from getting delivered?

Everyday my house gets at least one, but usually three to five, pieces of mail for previous residents of the house I’m renting. Today, for example, there are nine pieces of mail, none of them for anyone actually living here. It’s very annoying to go through the mail and sort out the stuff that’s not ours (we have five people living here, so we usually get enough of our own mail as it is.) The previous tenants also rented through a different landlord (the previous owner kicked out the last tenats, put the house up for sale, and is was bought and renovated by my landlord,) so it’s next to impossible to get any forwarding info on the old tenants, and I don’t want to bother even going down that road anyway. Why should I have to go through that hassle?

If I go to the post office and just say, “look, these people don’t live here anymore. Stop delivering their mail,” will they oblidge? My guess is that, since they have an obligation to deliver the mail since the postage was paid, then they might still go ahead and do it. But on the other hand, since they don’t live here anymore, they are facilitating in allowing me (or one of the other four people who live in) to read that person’s mail, should we so desire (not that we would ever want to, but this is a hypothetical sistuation.) Last I checked, one wasn’t suppossed to open up and read mail for someone else, so wouldn’t it be best for them to just not deliver it?

Heh, of course you should go to the post office. Who else is going to help with this problem?

The people that used to live there were supposed to fill out a form that forwards their mail from your address to their new address.

Draw a slash through the name on the envelope and put it back in the mail box. If it’s a catalog, call the toll free sales number and ask them to take your address off of their list. The catalogs are pre-printed so you’ll get a couple more before it stops.

I still occasionally get mail for the guy who sold me my house in 1993.

Give your local post office a call and they’ll tell you what to do. It’ll probably be similar to hajario’s suggestion.