A lot of laws are difficult to enforce in practice. That doesn’t change the legal standard. Most rational people realize that society works because most people follow the golden rule even without Big Brother watching (if you sent a parcel to your Aunt with your hand-knitted scarf as present, and made a mistake in adress, you sure would want the receiver to give it back, don’t you?). For the few people that don’t think of others, but only “Will I be punished for this?”, the mail is either “lost” (the 1% or less of mail each year that is), or they get found out later through unexpected circumstances.
I occasionally get wrongly delivered mail, when my mail carrier throws a bunch of envelopes into the mailbox and the wrong one has slipped in. Sometimes I even opened them before noticing that they were adressed to John Smith and not me, but I always put them back into the correct box or on top for the mail carrier to take away again.
Why don’t you write “Receiver deceased, please return to sender” on the envelope instead and give it to your postman?
You don’t know if you are going to be prosecuted, only that you haven’t been prosecuted so far. If there’s an important letter among the ones you threw away, and an investigation is launched into why it was neither answered nor returned, suspicion could land on you. (And you just confessed to it. ;))
Was this before web-cams? Did you not have a custodian at your house? Could you not have a word with the mail carrier to deliver it once a week on saturdays or give to a trusted neighbour instead?
No, nobody had the manpower and jurisdiction to catch and prosecute a small theft. When thousands of letters with credit cards get stolen by criminal rings, the post office does investigate. But generally, it’s the job of the police to catch criminals - the post office would only look if they suspect their own carriers instead of your ex - and the police has limited manpower (due partly to budget constraints).
Why would you have to go to the post office? Give it back the same way you received it. If it was left on your doorstep, just put it back out by your mailbox and leave a note. If you had to go to the post office anyway to pick it up (which millions of people have to do anyway b/c USPS won’t deliver), then don’t take it home.
Um… I deal with this regularly. My company will receive things from various vendors that we did not order merchandise from. They are established vendors, but the fact stands that if someone sends something to you (to you), it’s yours.
For example: A company we do business with ships us headsets figuring we’ll pay the invoice and replace older headsets with newer ones. I never liked this practice. After five minutes of checking, I was given the okay to keep them as a gift.
Some vendors don’t learn, so we’ve received over 50k dollars worth of various ‘gifts’ this year. It is finally trailing off.
I never understood this either. You send me an invoice without a valid purchase order number and I’m just going to giggle.
On the other hand, sales folks were always certain that didn’t apply to them. “Oh yeah, I told the vendor rep just to send them on through with my name and the date as a PO.”
I had a similar problem about 10 years ago. It was a domestic dispute similar to yours. I called a friend who worked for the USPS as a middle manager. He told me to not even bother that the feds were simply not interested in prosecuting opening mail that was not addressed to the opener when it was domestic in nature. They would tell people to get a state restraining order or the like, but under no circumstances would there be any federal interest in this sort of thing.
He told me the only time they care is when it is for a monetary fraudulent purpose. YMMV.
Yes. Or at least, long before I could afford to install a video monitoring system.
Not sure what you mean by “a custodian”, but I lived alone at the time.
Could not speak to letter carrier(s) as:
different carriers delivered on different days and I had no way of knowing which carrier would be on the route on which days;
but it was a moot point, as they all delivered while I was at work;
P.O. told me that “union rules” would not allow the carrier to hold the mail. Was that true or false? Don’t know, but that was their response. Further, I sometimes had to work on Saturdays, so holding it until Saturday wouldn’t help.
Delivering to another address (“forwarding”) had to be done through a formal request, which I made while waiting for a box to become available. I could have asked for my mail to be held at the P.O. for me to pick up, but the P.O. could not guarantee that some of it would be delivered to the house anyway. So, a box was the safer option. To the Postmaster’s credit, when he learned why I wanted a PO box, he put my name on the top of the waiting list.
I meant the guy who in an apt. complex does the complex janitorial work - caretaker or concierge.
Yeah, that sucks. I’m always at work during delivery times, too, so I never get the chance to tell the mail carrier to stop leaving parcels unsecured on my doorstep :rolleyes: because of the theft risk - but it mostly seems to happen when temp guys help out. (Luckily, they now have packstations here instead which are more comfortable for parcels).
FWIW, I think most US apartment buildings call that a manager or a superintendent. Custodian implies merely janitor here, concierge implies very high-end residence, and caretaker implies Jack Nicholson.
Not to mention Toucanna said it was in front of his/her house, I doubt there would have been a custodian or manager or concierge or anybody else to tell.
I’ve gotten USPS stuff dropped off in my box – packages. Those go on the ground in front of the mailbox. FedEx/UPS stuff on my porch – I rifle through it and dispose of the contents however I want. My landlord doesn’t know/doesn’t care who the prior occupants were, and I have no way of finding them out short of hiring a private detective. If it were something super expensive, I’d probably call the cops (but not take it to them – I have no idea where a police station is in my new neighborhood, and would only bother getting there if my cab fare were compensated plus time), but it is absolutely not sitting on my front porch until some private contractor shipping company decides, after a few weeks, to take it away.
What the Hell else am I supposed to do? Wait for fucking Kringle to come along? I don’t know these people, nobody I know or no neighbors I know know them, and it isn’t staying on my porch.
FYI these were commercially-wrapped boxes – I’d feel differently (although still, what could I do?) if it felt like Aunt VaJay’s handwoven scarf. I’d feel bad, but still, not much I can do, if the private company won’t arrange too pick up their problem at a time (and I mean to the minute time – I don’t have fucking two or three hours of window to fucking interrupt my business or hell my fucking afternoon douche or dishwashing load) I want.
Letter-sized mail USPS – back in the outgoing mail slot. If I’m feeling benevolent, I take a sharpy and write RTS on the front. ETA I think I can be arrested for that or something. Knowing various Postmasters, that ain’t going to happen.
To come completely clean, I did get a big box once from FedEx (I think it was) – it was pretty heavy, in manufacturer’s packing, and was a big rectangle. I called FedEx (or UPS) and dropped it in the street on the opposite side from my apartment. So, there, I’m not a bastard.
•Don’t put stamped mail over 13 oz in a blue collection box, Post Office lobby drop box, Automated Postal Center drop box, or any other unattended location.
I don’t know what they do with it if you did. Especially if you were able to clearly mark it…YOU GUYS SCREWED UP AND DELIVERED THIS TO THE WRONG ADDRESS !!!
I see that you can schedule a pickup but that seems to apply only to “priority” services.
I once bought a house from a guy that murdered his wife and was sent up for life. When his Independent Trucker magazines came, I threw them away, figuring it would be adding insult to injury to forward them.
