Well sure, they need to know the bad address to identify the record in their files to correct.
I used to maintain some political mailing lists, and I would sometimes get returns from people asking me to remove them from the list – but they had carefully blacked out completely. Now here in Minnesota, with a common Scandinavian name like ‘John Anderson’, there were a half-dozen on the list (plus a couple of Danish 'John Andersen’s). Without the address, I couldn’t tell which one I was supposed to remove! (And what was he trying to conceal anyway? I already had his address!)
well between the Oakland ca moron meter person that wrote a ticket and wrote the wrong letter down and got my aunts plate and sent her a ticket…the cars never been out of the antelope valley………
and ms Courtney mcfadden that’s an aspiring scientologist … I get wrong mail about twice a week …. Now whats annoyed me is getting this on the usps tracking page for xmas games shipment :
December 8, 2018 at 4:14 pm
Delivery Exception, Animal Interference
now unless my cat was rabid the other day……….
Pretty much the same thing happened to us as the OP. Odd thing is it started after we had owned the dwelling for over 10 years. An extensive search revealed nobody of any name even close to this person ever lived at the house, and we couldn’t find anyone even close to that name anywhere in the state.
And it wasn’t just junk mail. We got W-2 and 10-99 forms from employers that were addressed to the person. I tried talking with people at those businesses to solve this but it didn’t work. Apparently the guy didn’t care if he received his tax forms or not.
It took over a year of writing “no such person” on the mail and sending it back before it stopped.
ETA: One time I received a handwritten envelope that was addressed to someone in some town in Ohio. Address was nothing close to mine, name was nothing close to mine, zip code was way off, but somehow it ended up being delivered into my mail box in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And it was the only piece of mail I received that day. How did it get here and why did the postman put it in my box? Very strange.
When I moved, I got tons, like, multiple pieces every day for the first year or so for the people I bought the house from…like they didn’t even bother to change the address (which seems like something they would have done). I wrote “addressee not at address” on hundreds of pieces of mail. It did eventually slow down to a a trickle After a while I got sick of it and started tossing it. At that point it was mostly junk mail and I doubt they’re missing flyers from the car dealership and I’ll even go out on a limb and say they were far too lazy to pursue something like that. Furthermore, I figured if I stopped doing their job (forwarding all the mail they were too lazy to have forwarded), maybe they’d get off their ass and start updating their mailing addresses for anything they actually want.
Yeah, it’s illegal and when the postmaster shows up at my door, I’ll stop doing it. Until then, I’m going to keep throwing out their mail, it’s been almost 15 years.
Also, there’s the possibility that someone put down an incorrect or false address. Either by accident or to purposely slow down creditors. You can send it back, but there’s a good chance the person who used a fake address falsified other info as well so they’re unreachable. Mostly unrelated example, someone has been using my business phone number for credit cards/loads for probably 20+ years. I can’t tell you how many collection agencies I’ve had tell ‘no, there’s no one hear by that name’/‘no, no one with that name has ever worked here’/‘I’ve been here 30 years, there’s no ‘before my time’’. I know they don’t believe me, but what are you gonna do (actually I have thoughts on that).
The only option I can think of is to take the mail to your local post office and ask to speak to the postmaster. I’ve always heard that they take things very seriously there, but the one time I called them about something that I thought seemed very minor, the postmaster himself showed up at my door about 20 minutes later to discuss it and promise it would never happen again.
If you talk to the postmaster, it’s very possible they can stop any mail with that name and your address from even showing up and, if it’s not bulk/junk mail, they can take care of the ‘return to sender’ part.
The two mobile numbers are invalid (one belonged to a female in the house), but I called the landline and talked to his mother. Since the Post Office won’t redirect mail from me, I’ll put the State of Illinois letter into an envelope tomorrow and send it to the address I was given. He mother said she’d let him know, and have him re-do his CoA.
We’ve been receiving mail for the previous tenants of our house for over 10 years. It was owned by a church and occupied by a series of minister. It was also the dioceses office. I’d guess about 15% of the mail we receive is addressed to them.
Once a piece of mail arrived from the county, with "Important Tax Document’ or something like that, on the front, so I opened it. Turns out that a different piece of land still had our address listed as the contact address. It was a notice of non-payment of taxes. My SO contacted the county, to tell them of the change of house ownership, but the county couldn’t change the mailing address on our say so (which makes sense). I wonder if the church ever paid their taxes on that other land?
You also have to make allowances that this person doesn’t even exist. Someone could have been updating their mailing list and put in parts of someone else’s name, so it isn’t even a real person. Which in that case, you aren’t going to be able to find them.
I use to get old mail after years coming to our home from a previous owner, and after talking it over with the local postmaster he said I could either throw the mail out myself, or I could bring it to them. I said if I bring it to them, what do they do with it, and he said throw it out.
I don’t know the official rules on this, but I thought after the forwarding expired they do throw the mail out. Does anyone know for sure on this?
I am very surprised when people don’t bother to do a change of address for credit card statements and life insurance policies at the source.
First Class mail is automatically forwarded until the forwarding order expires (I think it’s 6 months now); after that it is returned to sender. All at no extra charge.
Other mail (like bulk marketing mail) depends on what service instructions the sender puts on the envelope. Options are:
Address Service Requested
Return Service Requested
Change Service Requested
Forwarding Service Requested
Electronic Service Requested
If none of these are given, the mail is discarded. And all of those come with extra charges, sometimes quite hefty – like up to double the cost of a first-class stamp. (But mailers sometimes find that worthwhile.)
Today we got a package from Amazon, addressed to a person I presume is Chase’s brother. Right address, but USPS delivered it to the wrong place. It’s only about a five-minute or so walk to the correct address, so I tried to deliver it (and find out if that’s where our Christmas wreath ended up a couple of years ago).
No joy. The place looked deserted from the road. The rutted dirt – or mud – driveway was flooded from the storm a couple of weeks ago, and there was no vehicle or any other sign of life. So I called Chase’s mother’s phone number and left a message. If the package is indeed intended for Chase’s brother, he can come and get it. Otherwise I’ll leave it out by the mailbox on Monday and let USPS try again (with reading glasses this time, I hope).
Interesting it happened often enough they had a stamp made up. What the hell’s going on in Elkton?
Decades ago I read the memoirs of a railway mail clerk back in the 30s. He had a lot of keys and was paranoid about losing them so he had his wife sew a button at the bottom of his pants pocket and kept the keys on a long leather lanyard the end of which was threaded through the button.
You’ve all seen films where a passing mail car snatches a town’s mail off of a crane with a big hook. The other half of that is the town’s mail getting kicked off of the train to roll to a stop in a paved area in the vicinity of the crane.
The incident in question, the paved area was just after the crane, so he catches the offered mail and immediately kicks the outgoing sack – and is nearly snatched out of the car. Unbeknownst to him, the keys had come out of his pocket and the lanyard was looped around the middle of the outgoing sack. He managed to save himself by grabbing onto the bar across the doorway but that wasn’t the end of his adventure.
“I don’t know what kind of thread my wife used, but it was awfully strong,” he commented. Nothing came loose and with each bounce and jounce, the sack was nearly making him lose his death grip on the bar. Of course he was screaming for help but a mail car is awfully rackety, especially with the door open, and none of his brother clerks heard him.
Meantime, about a quarter-mile past the pickup point was a grade crossing where his father worked as a crossing guard. Most nights they would wave at each other as the train passed, but this time the old man sees his son hanging on for dear life. He starts running down the track and comes across a cut up mailbag and mail scattered all over the place. It was the just-caught sack that the clerk had lost track of in his distraction. Needless to say he feared the worst.
Finally the sack wrapped itself around a passing switch stand and with a tremendous yank, his entire pants leg was snatched off. He pulled himself back in and closed the door before anybody looked up from their labors. He must have been quite a sight with one bare leg and doubtless, as pale as milk.
He didn’t specifically say, but I know I’d need a lie-down after something like that.
We’ve lived here 27 years now and still get mail for the previous residents from 3 area businesses. all are of the “time to service your furnace” type.
We’ve been in our house for 23 years (and the people from whom we bought it were here for three or four years previously), and we still regularly get mail for the people who moved out in the early '90s. Some of it is marketing mail, but we also occasionally get letters from banks and doctors, which makes me wonder how the former residents have maintained business and medical relationships for decades without ever updating their addresses. :eek:
Lots of good advice. The only thing I’d add is that I don’t believe you’re under any obligation to return or redirect mail immediately as you receive it. I’d collect it for a couple months then when convenient I’d drop it all into a mailbox (having Sharpied over my address and noted “Return to sender”, plus noting “Please update your database”.
Lastly - even though incorrect addresses are a waste of marketing dollars, many companies don’t like to update lists. They often resell those lists to other companies for X cents per name. There is incentive to keep the lists longer and less accurate rather than shorter and more accurate.