My roommates and I, all renting one house, are continually assaulted with mail from previous occupants, to the tune of at least two, if not three, four, or even five pieces of mail a day that does not have any of our names on it. Is there any way we can get the post office to stop delivering it? It’s annoying to have to sift through it all, and it fills up our trash. Not to mention that in the process of sorting and throwing out the bad mail, we might accidentally throw out a piece of mail meant for us.
I imagine if you wrote “No longer at this address” on it and tossed it in the mailbox instead, the senders would get the feedback and stop.
The usual problem is substitutes on the route. The regular carriers learn very quickly who’s living on their routes, but they don’t work every day, not to mention vacations, sick days, personal leave etc. A substitute is supposed to go through a list of who’s who, but realistically they can’t get the normal prep work done in time and would still be out there tomorrow if they checked every name for every house. So they don’t and mail from ten dwellers back gets delivered.
You should be able to stop in at the local office that the mail is sorted at and talk to a supervisor if this is really happening all the time. Rental houses are nightmares at best, so they may even appreciate some guidance. Be polite and just say: here’s the current list of acceptable names; please stop any others from being delivered.
You’ll probably never get rid of the occasional mistake, but you can keep them down to a dull roar.
Former summer sub.
I have been at my apartment a year and a half and I still get mail for former residents. But it’s essentially junk mailings, not anything important like letters or financial statements. So I doubt **Nanoda’**s suggestion of returning the mail to sender would do anything (which, AFAIK my apartment manager does this. I just leave them on top of the mailbox)
Also, I doubt the Post Office cares much - I live in south central L.A. and I’ve never seen such exuberance of bad attitude as the postal workers here exhibit, so Expano’s suggestion that the carriers on my route would actually know who lives in each apartment (and care enough to filter out mail not addressed to them) seems laughable, at least in my situation.
Perhaps contacting the senders directly and specifically informing them of the change of residency would help?
Our mail carriers are obliged to deliver anything addressed to our house whether it’s for us or not. It’s not a huge problem, I just write “no longer at this address” on the front and chuck it back in the nearest post box. It will either get back to the original sender (if there’s a return address) or it ends up in the post office’s dead letter centre and will eventually be disposed of.
Alternatively, if I’m sure it’s junk mail, it goes in my paper recycling box and gets disposed of that way. We don’t get a huge amount, not enough to cause a big problem, and it’s easy enough to get rid of.
As a postal worker, I can pretty much assure you that not only does the Post Office not care (it’s not their job to), but from what I’ve seen the issuing utilities, financial institutions etc don’t care either.
The person who scrawls:
THIS PERSON HASN’T LIVED HERE FOR SEVEN YEARS!!! I AM SICK OF THIS SHIT!!! ANY MORE WILL BE THROWN STRAIGHT IN THE TRASH!!! FUCK YOU!!!
… might think they are being original and hard-hitting, but when I sort an entire tray of about 500 RTS articles, and they all have variations of this theme written on them, I no longer pay any attention to it.
As for the issuing companies, there is likely some minimum wage grunt in the mail room receiving the returns. It’s more than likely his job to simply incinerate those returned articles. Why would he go out of his way to update the database for them?
I’m not defending this situation, but it would appear to be the way it is.