I Called the IS post office and asked them about dead letters, or rather letters than were not able to be delivered or returned to the sender, they kinda imply that well, they do such a great job that “All letters are delivered” Finally, I came to a woman who at least would admit that it did in fact happen, but where do they go, are they warehoused, are they saved forever, can they be opened at some point, am I allowed to go there and look and see if perhaps I have any mail that was left for me and browse through it all. There must be some old mail from perhaps the old days of WW1 and such, that has some historical value, not to mention there may be large amounts of money and other cool things, anyone know the story on this.
I don’t know the procedure in other countries, but the German Mail operates one “investigation centre” in Marburg where all undeliverable letters are brought to. The people working there do all day long try to find out where to send a letter marked as “undeliverable”, by means nobody exactly knows (I think they compare it to forwarding orders given by people who have moved, telephone directories and things like this). They say they are able to deliver almost every letter this way (even if there is a pretty wrong address on it), with a certain delay of course. They are even allowed, in very very special cases, to open a letter in order to find something out about addressee or sender (no censorship, just service for the customer). If a letter is absolutely undeliverable, they will normally deliver it back to the sender; everything else would be legally not possible, since the letter is not their property.
Yet you can from time to time read in the newspapers about old letters mailed decades ago that were delivered these days; I don’t think they are stored anywhere, they simply were lost in the post office some day and re-found there years later, and cases like this are very rare, considering the hundreds of millions of letters handled by the postal agencies. No central very old mail store anywhere.
I will run this past the Better Half when he comes home for lunch, but as I understand it, the procedure is as follows:
First Class Mail that has no return address is opened and some attempt is made to figure out where it goes. If no clues are available, it goes into storage somewhere.
Artifacts that have obvious value (jewelry, etc.) go into storage.
Everything else goes in the garbage.
And no, they don’t invite the general public to come rummage through the storeroom to see what’s in there, even if you “think your mom sent you some money” and you want to go look. If you really do think you’ve got a letter in there somewhere, you talk to the Postmaster in question (at the post office where you think the letter may have gone astray), and describe it, and he can send a clerk back there to look.
The clerk you talked to, Scott, has been carefully trained to give people who come in asking if they can rummage through the Dead Letter Office the brushoff, exactly as you describe. Many people have the same Great Idea and want to look for Adolf Hitler’s secret diaries, or the complete plans for a Klingon bird-of-prey, or the UnaBomber’s “other” manifesto, or even just “my child support check that my bitch of an Ex says she didn’t get, and I know I mailed it, so it must be in there somewhere…”
The US Postal Service seems to deliver just about anything after a period. At the library I work, we get envelopes with barely discernible scratchings on them. No ZIP codes. Just things like “Library” and something like a city name.
Then we’re supposed to try to answer any question inside, but those usually aren’t any better.
I once got a letter from the dead letter office. Someone sent me a letter (this was years ago and don’t remember all the details) w/o a return address and an incomplete street address maybe name and state/zip or something like that. Well when I got it it was in another envelope as they opened the letter to find out where it goes - along with a note explaining what happened.
Just a little side note about the German system. Every law abiding citizen is registered with the town he lives in. No choice in the matter - you get fined if the registrar finds you living in his town without being registered. You also have to unregister and reregister when you move from town to town. The chances of the German post finding out where you live if you have moved are very good. They just go to the registrar’s office in the town the letter was sent to and start tracking.
As an American living here in Germany, the system really does not appeal to me. It smacks of totalitarianism and a Big Brother mentality that is foreign to me. On the other hand, I don’t do things that would interest the government in any way so I register to stay legal. Besides, as a legal foreign resident, I am registered anyway for my residence and work permits.
What if there is no return address? Do they burn it, as i believe is done in the US?
I would prefer not to reply to this inquiry.
HA HA HA HA HA!
English teacher humor! Ain’t it grand!
Anyhoo, May I direct you to the July 25, 1997 edition of This American Life. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to link directly to it through the frames, but the third act of the program will answer all your questions.
Speaking from personal experience, nope. A few months ago I dropped off the rent check in the mail without remembering to put a stamp on it - or a return address (stupid, I know). Luckily, I realized my mistake a few hours later and stopped payment on the check and mailed a new one.
But a couple months later, I got an envelope from (IIRC) the “Postal Recovery Facility” or somesuch operation like that in Minneapolis. Inside was my original envelope, neatly opened with my check inside - they’d gleaned my address off of it, apparently. I found it remarkable that they wouldn’t deliver my letter across town without a stamp, but they’d transport it halfway across the US and back.
Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in the administration. When I think over this rumor, I cannot adequately express the emotions which seize me. Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:—the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity:—he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.
Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!
—Herman Melville
Well, I know it’s a REALLY great collection of B-sides and other songs that didn’t make it on other R.E.M. albums…
[ducks and runs]
Patty
It is true what you say about this typical German institution, the Einwohnermeldeamt (resident’s register office; it was introduced by an American who emigrated to Bavaria in eraly 19th century, BTW, and he got the title of a count for this). The main purpose of this is, however, not postal, but the safety of elections: In the US, it is no problem to register at several places under several names in order to vote more than once, in Germany it is absolutely impossible. Yet Germany has powerful data protection laws, providing detailed regulations on when an authority or a company that has collected data about a citizen is allowed to use these data or pass them on to other institutions. I do not think the Mail is allowed to request information from the registers (especially after the privatization of the German Mail in 2000), but I am not sure. The legal regulations about the mail network are still pretty strict (the agency has to provide that no point in Germany is not farer away from the nearest post office than allowed, every change in the fees has to be approved, and so on).
I know many Americans consider the German practice as totalitarian, but Germans actually like it (although you have to fill out tons of paper if you move), since it provides for security and is protected pretty well against abuse. It’s the same with gun control: Nobody here can understand why Americans insist on this fatal “right to bear arms”.
What about burning undeliverable letters: I cannot imagine they do that, the mail is not their property. They get paid for delivering it, so they have to deliver it by any means, and they usually manage it. Maybe they put them in the postal museum 
Naa, if there is absolutely nothing to be done, they get a special permit to open the letter, and they can find out addressee or at least sender by doing this.
Wow, I thought I was the only person who made reference to “Bartleby the Scrivener” in daily life. Or is yours from something else?
Okay, I finally ran this past the Better Half, and he says yeah, they open up the First Class mail and try to figure out where it goes, from internal evidence. If there are no clues, they keep it for a year, and then get rid of it, he didn’t know exactly how, but incineration sounds about right.
Everything else “undeliverable” goes in the Circular File.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Schnitte *
**
Schnitte:
I am perfectly aware of the use of the Einwohnermeldeamt. It does, however, get used by the postal service. And, despite anything you say, the system truly reeks of totalitarianism. By your own admission, it is a system started by a non-democratic government, and has been upheld by all of the governments since then. It no doubt made the Nazis life much easier - they knew exactly the religion and ethnic derivation of every citizen, making it trivial to track and persecute certain groups.
Does it not bother you that your own government has so little trust in its own electing citizens that they feel it necessary to monitor them to this degree?
I am not protesting that I must be registered. I expect that since I am not a citizen, but rather a foreign national legally residing here. It bothers me considerably, however, that an entire nation must be monitored like potential criminals and that the citizens are so resigned to it that I have never heard of so much as a token protest against the system.
This thread is in danger of becoming a discussion about what nation is more totalitarian instead of answering a postal question. Yet I would like to give Mort Furd a reply.
Germans do not feel being observed by the Einwohnermeldeamt, they accept it, mostly because it has always been like this. Many Germans hate it, but not because of a fear of surveillance, but simply because you have to re-register if you move, which takes time to go to the office. Most people here, in fact, cannot imagine how a state can be organized differently, since without this institution, rigging an election (by voting several times) or cheating with your tax payments is much easier. The registers also issue the passports and the ID cards (mandatory for every person aged 16 or older) which are pretty safe against counterfeiting. It seems like perfect surveillance, but I personally think that your personal freedom in Germany is much more intensive than in the U.S. (please do NOT understand it as if I wanted to insult the Americans, I simply try to give examples that outweigh the register system!). One little everyday example: Traffic controls. Here, it is the American police that considers every person controlled as a potential killer - you are supposed to move as little as possible, every moving of the hand can be regarded as a potential attack on the officer, etc. In Germany, traffic controls are much more “comfortable”, because the cop has fewer rights (fines for speeding, etc., are also much lower, 30 marks [about $15] if you drive 50 km per hour instead of 30, as allowed)It’s the same with courts: An American judge has much more power than a German one, your chances as a defendant are better.
Most people here think that the American conception of “freedom” is wrong. German law restricts your private freedom a bit, but it does so in order to secure it. That’s why we have gun control: You can go to school without the danger of getting killed, and this makes me feel freer. I have to get an ID card as soon as I’m 16, but this ensures that legal regulations on miniumum age (for drinking, e.g.) are observed, which protects the society and makes it feel freer. And Europeans usually feel horrified if they hear about the totalitarian methods in those Arizona bootcamps, so please don’t teach the Chinese about human rights.
It is true that the registering system helped the Nazi a lot in persecuting Jews and othe rethnic groups, and believe me, there is a lot of discussion about this in Germany still. But the system itself is not a Nazi idea, it is much older, and it has shown itself as usual. And, no, the mail is not allowed to request information from the registers - I asked a judge.