Well, you’re committing the same Federal crime if you open your own mail, so…
Often junk mail will say “or current resident” or something like that. You may be in the clear.
Strange that this thread pops up on the same day I find two items in my mailbox that are addressed to the tenant before me. One is from a nonprofit organization and the other appears to be fan mail to a former actress from The Waltons. I’m bringing it them to the leasing office in the morning.
Speaking of misdirected mail, I had a weird incident happen to me many years ago.
I received a letter addressed to me at my address. I did not recognize the sender. But since it had my name and address I opened it.
Well it was a form letter to someone else about a court date in another jurisdiction. I’m totally puzzled as to why someone would mail me someone else’s letter. So being curious I googled the name on the actual letter. It was a relatively common name and got lots of hits. I added my town name to the search. I see a hit with my street in it. But the house number is wrong. But, it’s like mine, but with two digits transposed. I theorize that the sender had some sort of lookup software that took the mistyped address and looked it up got my name, and used it as the addressee.
So I call the sender and tell them what happened. They asked me if I could bring it to the correct house. It was about a quarter mile down the street so I agreed, but, I put it in a new envelope correctly addressed with correct return address and left it in their mailbox.
Never heard a thing about the incident again.
We don’t usually see misdelivered mail here but sometimes there’s a person being lazy with their Amazon deliveries. One time, they missed the intended recipient by about 300 feet; I was able to track down the recipient via Google, called them, and met up to hand off their package.