I get a lot of junk mail. The only mail I ever get that I ‘want’ is bills - and I can check/pay those all online, the paper copy I get in the mail is mostly just a reminder.
I know that I legally have to have a mailbox. But could I just say to hell with it and never get the mail out of it?
If I don’t have to, what would happen to it? I imagine it would pile up a bit before they stopped delivering it, but what would they do then? return it all to sender? hold it in a huge pile for me to pick up? Throw it away for me?
If I do legally have to get my mail, what’s the penalty for not getting it? Could I theoretically end up in jail for not picking up my mail? Will the mail police come to my door, or will they just send me an angry letter (that I won’t pick up)?
Anyway this is mostly hypothetical - the mailbox is right by the door and it’s not really that difficult for me to grab it. I was just thinking about it after the 3rd day in a row that everything in it went straight from the box to the trash without ever being opened.
Don’t have an answer for you but in a similar vein, I get 3 “free” newspapers tossed on my driveway every week. Mostly worthless advertising. It’s a weekly hassle that I have to gather them all up and throw them in the trash. What a waste of paper and I hate adding more junk to the landfill.
I wish there was a list to stop them from littering my lawn with their junk.
There is no legal penalty for not responding to your mail.
If you let it pile up to the point where it blocks the carrier’s ability to deliver the mail, then somebody might pay you a visit.
Of course, if you ignore any bills, legal notices, or other important correspondence you are legally responsible for the consequences. You can’t tell the world how to correspond with you. a) Most of the world won’t get the message; b) some of the world has legal requirements to send you notices through the mail; c) the world doesn’t care what you say.
As far as I know my parents have never had a mailbox at their beach house and they have owned it for over 20 years. All the bills (power, water, etc.) for that house are sent to their primary house.
I am not sure what happens to junk mail that is sent to that address. Maybe the PO holds it for a while and then throws it out? I guess you have to have a street address for tax purposes but it seems that here in NC you don’t have to have an actual mailbox.
I hate hate hate those frickin’ things! I have a very bad back, and seriously prioritize the number of times I bend down. I hate those frickin advertising papers and would dearly love to get the jerks fined for littering.
I don’t think you are, actually, but I can’t seem to find a cite either way.
Regardless, you’re not obligated to receive mail. It might be worth calling the local post office to check, but technically, all you need to do is leave a signed note in your mailbox saying you don’t want to receive anything by mail, and it’ll stop.
I imagine unless you got into serious mail fraud or, say, put a bomb in your mailbox, you’re extremely unlikely to get hauled off to jail for anything mail-related; at most if you were a major nuisance they’d just stop delivering to you.
I know this one!!!
I’m a letter carrier. You DONT have to have a mail box. You can call the post office, tell them to close the box and return all your mail “moved left no forward” or “unclaimed” or “no mail receptacle”. We mark your address at the post office as no receptacle. Usually that means the occupants have a PO Box, but we don’t care. After that all your FIRST CLASS mail will be returned to sender. Your “other” mail (We aren’t allowed to call it JUNK) will be disposed of at your local post office. At mine, we recycle the paper.
And if you just stop picking up your mail, when the box gets full, we take it all to the office, hold it 10 working days then return it to sender. In some offices they will mark the box moved left no forward, in some they will just fill the box up again, until at some point they get the hint. If you have a regular rural mail box (on a pole in front of your house) simply leave a note for the carrier, explaining your wish and take your box down!
The problem can be ordering things over the internet. No mail means no parcels either. We get them ALL the time. The customer thinks the item is coming UPS and the seller sends it USPS. Just a warning.
You should be able to call the people who publish/distribute them and get them to stop. Persistance (i.e. multiple calls) may be required if they continue to deliver them. Eventually the appropriate person (i.e. whoever drives around throwing them in driveways) will get the message and pay attention to the address when they do the throwing.
I don’t know where I got it in my head you legally had to have a mailbox… it’s just one of those things I’ve ‘known’ so long I don’t even think about it.
I don’t expect I’d ever actually cancel my mail service, but it’s nice to know I could if I wanted to.
Slight hijack, but this thread reminds me of something I’ve always wondered.
In the US, it seems to me that most mail is delivered to those tin mailboxes you see at the end of the drive or by the side of the road.
When I was in Colorado once, I learned that home deliveries didn’t happen, everyone who wanted mail had to rent a box at the post office and pick it up themselves. So not only did they have to travel to pick it up, but they had to pay for the privilege as well. Why is this?
We in the UK must be lucky or unlucky (depending how you look at it). All mail and newspapers are posted through the front door. It’s then up to us to sort the junk from the wanted.
The U.S. is a huge, huge country with lots of places in it. Each place has a different set of requirements.
The mailboxes on the side of the road are mainly in suburban and rural locations. (I don’t know if they were ever truly tin - bends too easily - but most are plastic today. People can make their own as long as they conform to U.S. postal specifications and those can be of any substance at all. Some are amazing.) They make sense because a mail truck with right hand drive can work out of a location central to a zip code and go up and down all the streets.
[Aside: I worked for the the Post Office in the 70s summers during college. Except for a few sports cars, all autos had bench seats in those days. I was required to use my own car while delivering these routes. Yes, I sat in the passenger seat, used my left foot on the gas pedal and my left hand on the wheel, and rode down a street stuffing mail into the boxes with my right hand. On child-heavy suburban tract home streets. Can you imagine the lawsuits if anyone did that today? Yet the regular mailmen (and they were almost all men) did that every single day, summer and winter. Unbelievable.]
Cities are very different. I’m sure some cities, especially newer ones, use street boxes. However, in older, more densely built-up eastern cities, these simply did not exist within city limits. A few might be found somewhere, I suppose, but I never saw even one.
The vast majority of streets in the city had individual houses on small lots. The carrier stashed mail in green boxes around the route (or, more usually had a specialist do this). You took the bundle that you had pre-sorted at the Post Office and started walking, going from house to house. There were three main types of receptacles. One was a mailbox of varying sizes and types attached to a wall next to the front - or sometimes side or back - door. The second was a slot in the front door that you pushed the mail through. (Magazines were always too small and you had to push them through anyway and not tear them.)
The third were milkboxes. For those who are younger than 50: milkmen (again, almost universally men) came to your house to drop off milk and other dairy products. A hole was cut in your outside wall for this purpose, say, 18" x 12". There was an outside hinged door and an inside hinged door. You placed your empty milk bottle inside the hole. The milkman took it to be reused and replaced it with a full milk bottle. You reached in and grabbed it. Most people who had these milkboxes continued to use them for mail delivery long after the milk deliveries faded into nostalgia.
Apartment houses had a different arrangement. They had a row of hinged doors openable only by a key. So did the carrier have to have all these keys? Fortunately, no. The whole arrangement hinged out at the bottom, leaving a row of holes at the top into which the mail could be dropped. Those keys were standard and you only needed one.
There were other specialized arrangements, but those were the overwhelming majority.
Now, the whole point of the Post Office and now the USPS is that it will deliver a letter to you, no matter where you live, for 44 cents. That’s what the privateers who want FedEx or UPS to take over the mail forget. Everybody, rich, poor, city, rural, other, gets the same service for the same price. That’s truly not a bug, but a feature.
There are places in the huge, huge country where it is simply impossible for a carrier to make the rounds in a reasonable amount of time. And these houses can’t possibly bear the cost of hiring individual dedicated carriers to do nothing but deliver junk mail. Long ago, the USPS gave up and started requiring these people to come to a central station for pick up. I didn’t realize they had to pay for this. I’m surprised, although it might be true today given that the USPS runs huge debts every year.
It is true that every? post office has boxes to rent so that you don’t have to give out your home number or want privacy or run a business or have a mistress or whatever. These are the P. O. numbers that you see so often in addresses. Are you sure you’re not getting these confused with free pickup?
When I put a vacation hold on my mail, the good folks at the post office throws away “Penny Saver”-type flyers and the like. It’s kind of bizarre when I go in to pick up 2 weeks worth of mail and there are only 5 or 6 envelopes.
The mailboxes were certainly metal. Plastic mailboxes are a fairly new thing. It’s actually a sort of folk art in some rural areas to create a post holding up your mailbox which looks strange and creative. The box itself has to fit certain post office specifications, but the post holding it up can be anything.
Rayne Man, if I understand correctly, the difference between the U.S. and the U.K. is that in the U.S. no one except the mail carrier can put anything into an official mail receptacle. So if the slot in the door is the way that people get their mail, no one else can put anything through it in the U.S. As I understand it, in the U.K. other people can put handouts of various kinds into the slot.
You are correct. The householder, not the Royal Mail, “owns” the slot and so everything goes into there. This includes mail, letters and advertising flyers.
As a side note, in the UK the newspaper boy doesn’t just cycle down the street hurling the papers onto the front lawn, he comes to the front door and delivers the paper via the slot. Mind you our particular boy doesn’t seem to have the intelligence to realise that the Sunday paper is so bulky that he really needs to separate it out and not to try to jam the whole thing through the slot in one go.
Incidentally, in the U.S. we can expect to get various sorts of advertising flyers and such in our mailboxes. The difference is that they have to go through the U.S. Mail. The people doing the advertising have to pay the post office for the postage (although there will be no stamps on the flyers) and the mail carriers deliver the flyers to the mailboxes.
Anybody can post their flyers through the post slot. For instance once a week we get a guy from the local Chinese restaurant delivering his menu and special offer leaflet.