USPS sent back package undelivered but I need to know who sent it

Factual Questions
1

TLDR version: USPS website/customer service sent back a package to the original sender but cannot tell me where it came from. I need to know.

Longer version:
So the post office tried to deliver something that required an authorized recipient (I assume this just means a signature) earlier this month when I was out of town. Their website, under informed delivery, lists it as a “package” but it might just be a certified letter. It says “certified mail” when I click on the package tracking on usps.com.

Often times the informed delivery package tells me generally where the package is coming from, but not specifically any address. But this one doesn’t have anything identifying it. Just a tracking number.

Anyway, the website gave me several options. Pick up at post office, redeliver, return to sender. I picked redeliver, and chose to have it redelivered the next day. It never came. The USPS website still, currently, says it’s scheduled for delivery for a date last week. So a couple of days later I went to the post office and tried to pick it up there. After lots of waiting (that post office always has a 1+ hour wait for anything), the guy took my tracking number and went searching for 20 minutes around the back. He came back with a letter on his hand - but I couldn’t see what it was - and he asked to see my ID. I showed it, he looked at it, looked back at the letter, and said “oh they got this all messed up” and walked away from the counter. I started asking “wait, what’s the letter you have in your hand?” but he had already walked away. After another 15 minute wait (there were now about 30 people behind me in line), he comes out and says “here, sign this and it will be delivered tomorrow” - now, what I should have said was “hey, wait, what was that letter you had in your hand earlier? Why can’t you just give it to me now?” but I was running late to something, felt bad for holding up the line for so long, and forgot to ask and just trusted their word they’d deliver it the next day. They did not.

I filed a USPS customer service ticket (via phone) with the tracking number, talked to the person, explained the situation, and they said they made a support ticket for someone at my local office who would get back to me in a few days. So that person did get back to me, and told me that it was accidentally sent back to the sender. I asked if they could at least tell me who the sender was so that I could figure out who to tell to re-send it, but they told me they didn’t have that information.

Now - I am currently the executor of an estate that has required me to pass along important mail with like 10 different entities recently. I have no idea what this letter is, but I suspect it’s related to that. But which entity? And about what? This could be potentially very important.

Is there someone I can contact, or some way to figure out who sent that package? It would shock me if they somehow have no record of the sender’s address - after all, they just sent it back to whoever sent it - but both the support person at the post office and the customer service person on the phone told me they didn’t have that information.

2

Here’s a longshot for you:

In 2018, I signed up for the US Mail’s Informed Delivery program. Essentially, they email photos of the mail you’re about to receive a day or three before it’s delivered.

Obviously, it’s too late for you to sign up now, but it doesn’t make sense that the USPS would selectively scan only the mail intended for program participants. It makes a lot more sense to me that they’re scanning all mail and only sending the photos to those who signed up. There may well be a photo of the envelope somewhere.

But that’s painting the lily; there’s almost certainly a database record tied to the tracking number that shows who sent the letter. I’d expect someone at the USPS to be able to find that record, but I’ve been disappointed by the US Mail before.

You have a great legal reason to find out who sent you that letter. I’m speculating, but if you can’t get traction through your local postmaster, a letter from an attorney might help the USPS take you more seriously.

But I’m not an attorney myself, so I may be in left field there. The upshot, though, is that there’s reason to think this is a solvable problem.

3

I do have informed delivery on. They send you pictures of the normal mail (letters) but not packages. Though this sounds like it was a certified letter, apparently it goes through the package system, and therefore does not have any image of a return address. The reply I got from the worker at my local post office also mentioned that because it was certified, there’s no image for her to access - sounds like she’s looking at it on a similar system as I can on their website.

But it’s hard to believe it’s not stored somewhere in their system - after all, computers need to know what the delivery and return addresses are in order to process them. So it’s probably stored somewhere, maybe just not in the system that their website uses, nor their customer service service phone line, and whatever supervisor e-mailed me from the local post office.

4

When I get a certified letter, it usually does show in informed delivery. Not always of course, but the scan will show the letter, while I’m pretty sure if I go to the informed delivery website it shows as both - the scan under “mailpieces”, and the tracking number will show as a package.

5

That’s what I was thinking; talk directly to the local postmaster, not just the clerk at the window. They may be able to tell you more.

6

So I called back the USPS customer service and got transferred up to a supervisor. He said that they have no information on the original address of the package. I said - well, you may not on your customer-facing system, but someone has to have that information, because your machines had to know the return address to send back the mail, and asked if he could connect me with someone who might have that information.

He said that that’s not true, that the mail is returned to the mailstream marked return to sender, and then it’s sorted and sent without actually recording the return address, that nowhere records the return address they’re sending it to.

I find that highly implausible, as I can’t imagine the package is returned/delivered to the return address without ever recording what that return address was, but he said that there’s just no way for anyone to ever give me that information.

I may be at a dead end. Maybe he’s right in that the information is just not available to any sort of service worker facing system, even though the machines would’ve had to have known it at some point (unless it was sorted by hand the whole way, which seems implausible). I don’t know how else I would go about this.

7

You have the tracking number doesn’t that indicate where is started, the city at least?

8

It has the first distribution/sorting facility that it went through, but that doesn’t clarify things unfortunately. No other correspondence I’ve had came from that area. But that happens sometimes - sometimes I’ll send something to one entity and they’ll share that data with another entity who will then send me a letter, so it could’ve been something like that.

It’s hard for me to guess where it came from, because I don’t know who might send me what. I’ve had to do a lot of correspondence relating to the estate.