It’s something I saw sometimes, mainly in Western tv shows and movies. Someone would mail a letter to somebody, using as address just the name and “General Delivery” and some town name. Like “Bob Farmboy, General Delivery, Sacramento, CA.” I presume the idea was that the sender knew Bob Farmboy had headed off with the idea of going to that town, but didn’t have a pre-established address there, and he would (hopefully) eventually wander into the Sacramento Post Office and say “I am Bob Farmboy, do you have mail for me?”
So, is that still a thing you can do nowadays? If so, how long will that Post Office hold onto the letter for an otherwise unknown person?
Like, if I pick a random name (say James Tomasen, I have no reason such a guy exists) and select some random town (I suspect this may work better in a small town, so we’ll say Inkom, Idaho, pop 863 rather than Los Angeles, pop two gazillion) and send off the letter, will they hold onto it in hopes Mr. Tomasen will some day stroll in?
If so, how long will they hold it – weeks, months, years? Until that branch of the Post Office, or the entire Post Office system closes down?
And then what? They stamp it ‘never claimed’ and send it back to the sender? What if there’s no return address?
[This is the kind of thing I ponder when I wake up at 3 am and can’t go back to sleep.\
Over here we’d call it by the French name Poste Restante. I’d have thought it died long ago, what with electronics and privatisation, but it seems the UK Post Office has it (two weeks for inland post, a month for overseas). Likewise France (two weeks) and Germany (7 days).
Oh, dear, not long enough to be useful. See, I started out thinking about a situation in which someone had to keep a physically small something (think a really valuable postage stamp, the only copy of rich Uncle Joe’s will, the number of your secret Swiss bank account) where it was secure and retrievable by you but no police agency or fellow baddies could find it no matter how intense or prolonged the search was. I thought just mailing it off to the Post Office in a town you had no other connection to might serve very well. There’s no paper trail or connection between you and that Post Office for the searchers to find, and all you’d need was some sort of ID for that name (I presume?) and a little road trip to retrieve it when desired.
But a month isn’t long enough for determined searchers to give up.
My son took a solo canoe trip last summer down the Mississippi River from its source in Minnesota all the way to the Gulf.
He mailed packages to himself with food and other supplies to several post offices alongside the river for him to collect as he passed through. It worked well for him.
Just go to Nowheresville 1 and pick up the package, slap on a label directing it to GD in Nowheresville 2 (or even another post office in Nowheresville 1), and send it off. Rinse and repeat as long as necessary.
Not every post office accepts General Delivery mail, so be sure to check before mailing.
Homeless people in Arizona often use General Delivery when signing up for food stamps. Like any other government office, the food stamp program uses mail to communicate with their clients.
This is often used for hikers along the Appalachian Trail since it passes through many towns along the way. I’m not sure if it’s as popular along other long trails in the US (Continental Divide,Pacific Crest) because they pass through fewer towns.
How does that even work with only a name? How do you claim your mail at the office? ID wouldn’t help, as there could be several Bob Farmboys in Sacramento at the same time.
Back about 50 years ago, I worked for a custom wheat harvester. We started in Oklahoma and worked our way north through the Great Plains, ending up in Montana. We stayed in trailer parks in (extremely) small towns throughout the summer.
My boss had regular customers and knew the approximate dates we would be working for these customers. So if my family wanted to send me mail in early June, they would address it to Railer13, in care of Franklin Harvesters, General Delivery, Tinytown, OK. In August it would be sent to General Delivery, Remote Village, Montana. In all cases, the wife of the boss would visit the local post office, tell the clerk who she was, and the names of the guys for whom she was picking up mail. This system worked well.
But, of course, that was in the late 60s/early 70s. Doubtful if it would be this easy today, but, then again, today there’s really no need to send mail by post, when an email, IM, or tweet will suffice.
There are services that will open and scan your mail and send you the scan by email. That works in a lot of circumstances - for example, I can renew my drivers license online, but the renewal notice comes via mail, not email. But government agencies generally communicate by mail and some people still get paper checks and scanning won’t work - the check cashing place wants the actual check. .
There might be several Bob Farmboys in Sacramento at one time, and there may even be multiple Bob T. Farmboys in Sacramento - but what are the chances that two Bob T. Farmboys in Sacramento are both using General Delivery at the same time? There’s only one post office for general delivery in NYC and maybe 7-8000 people get mail there last time I saw a number. And when I saw that number, the article quoted a Postal Service employee who said he tells people to have their mail addressed with a middle initial.
But as the OP implied in his post #3, you’re being watched by adversaries who want to get their hands on the [whatever].
You visiting Nowheresville #1, a place to which you have no connection, would be a huge red flag that they should follow you closely while there and bonk you over the head at the appropriate moment. Like just after you retrieve your package from the post office but before you can re-package and re-address it to Nowheresville #2 then mail it again.
Probably the best way to achieve the OP’s goal is something close to the “Stranger on a Train” maneuver. Which relies on you making the handoff to someone you innocently but reliably and repeatedly cross paths with before you come under any persistent observation. And of course involves them being willing to do an oddball favor for a stranger reliably and without questions or failures. Which Hitchcock showed us cannot be relied upon.
Years ago, I read a mystery story with that as the key point.
As I recall it, the protagonist was blackmailing someone that he had once worked with in a criminal activity. He told the criminal/blackmail victim that if anything happened to him, within a week the District Attorney would get a confession and documentary proof exposing the criminal activity that the two of them had done together.
His trick was that he had mailed the confession & proof documents to himself at his office, special delivery signature required. If not signed for within 3 days, they would be returned to sender. And for the sender return address, he put the District Attorney’s office. Every week, he got that delivered & signed for it; then put it into a new envelope and mailed it again with the rest of his outgoing mail.
But then he fell very ill, and was sick in bed for several days. So not there to sign for the envelope and get it. He phoned the office, but the postal worker couldn’t accept anyone else signing for the envelope. So it got ‘returned’ to the DA …
When I was backpacking around parts of Asia and western Europe, about 30 years ago, backpackers quite often use the Poste Restante system to get mail. I don’t know whether it worked in most of Asia (probably not), but it certainly worked in former UK colonies, like Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong. And it certainly worked in western Europe.
Edited to add: and when I crewed on cruising yachts in the Med and Caribbean they would use the same system. The yacht I spent the most time on had a system with a friend who forwarded packets of mail to each location at which the yacht was going to call. And the friend would number the packets and the yacht would stay at a location till it received the last one for the particular location.
Btw, out of curiosity I googled my invented names. Seems James Tomasen has a linked in account and used to be an old-time radio personality while Bob Farmboy has a slew of current activities, like a book, a computer game and some fan funded movie about it and also a line of sandwiches named after him.
Makes me wonder if it’s possible to invent a ‘normal’ type name and have it NOT actually be someone’s name already.
I got a birthday card via general delivery at the post office in Escalante, Utah. I had been flirting with a co-worker before going on vacation and jokingly told her that she should send me a birthday card there.
Much to my surprise, there was a letter from her waiting for me at the Escalante post office. I replied with a postcard saying it had made my day. When I got back from vacation we went beyond flirting and ended up dating for several years.
