We moved about six months ago, and at the time signed up for “permanent” mail forwarding from USPS, which it said was good for one year for regular mail. We set it up for the “family” (or whatever they call the option that forwards everything for the same last name; I don’t remember exactly).
It was working for a while, but we haven’t received anything at all for a few months now. It would be nice to chalk that up to us just having done a really good job of updating our address with everyone who sends us mail, but we know of several specific personal pieces of mail that never arrived. Furthermore, we sent a test piece of mail from one of our office addresses to our old address under my name, and it neither was forwarded nor returned (that was six weeks ago, which I think is plenty of time). So I assume the new resident there tossed it (even though we made sure to make it look like a personal letter, not junk mail), or it got lost somewhere along the way.
While all this is going on, almost weekly we receive mail for the former owners of our house. We know them, and they swear up and down that they too enabled “permanent” forwarding when they moved. None of these are strangely addressed (misspelled names, bad handwriting, etc.), or seem to have any characteristics that should throw off the forwarding. They’re all very clear-cut pieces of mail for the former residents (and I’m talking about things like Christmas cards, wedding invitations, personal letters, bank statements, etc. - not junk mail and magazines, which I know are handled differently).
So this seems to be two cases of USPS forwarding simply failing to work as promised.
What is our recourse here? Is there anything to gain by complaining to the post office? Should we complain to the post office at our old address or our new one? How do I contact them? The USPS website doesn’t have a phone number for the individual post offices, and it’s too far to physically go over there.
And how does this work anyway? Is the system just up to some overworked person in a sorting facility pulling out the stuff that’s supposed to be forwarded, or is it somehow automated? I can’t imagine humans handling the volume that must go through the system, but I also don’t really see how this could be done effectively by a machine (and perhaps there is the problem…).
By the way, I realize that it’s our responsibility to update our address with people, and we have done that as much as we can. But some companies only send us stuff once or twice a year, so it’s hard to remember them all. And individuals, well, even some who we sent moving announcements to seem to not have bothered to update their address books…